Linguistics and

Language Teaching
What is language? (Chapter 6)
 Humans vs. Animals
What does it mean to know a language?

Linguistics knowledge (production and understanding):

 Knowledge of sound system

 possible sounds/group of sounds
 possible sound positions
 knowledge of words
 arbitrary relation of form (sounds) and meaning
(concept)
 sound symbolism (words whose pronunciation suggests
the meaning); superset of onomatopoeic words and gl-
group in English: glare, glitter, glossy)
 onomatopoeic words (words imitating the sounds
associated with the entity referred to, i.e. a noun or a
verb; affected by the language’s sound system)
e.g. cock-a-doodle-doo
 basic vocabulary
 Knowledge of sentences and non-sentences
 Knowledge of appropriate sentences for different
situations
 The creativity of linguistic knowledge
(form/understand novel words/sentences with fixed
rules)
**usually unconscious**

Linguistic knowledge and performance

- competence vs. performance
- slips of the tongue
What is grammar?
 Mental grammar
- existing in the mind of the speaker
(individual and shared)
 Descriptive grammar
- Describes speakers’ linguistic knowledge (what they
know about their language)
 Prescriptive grammar
- States what language rules should be followed
- Usually relies on the prestige dialect
 Teaching grammar
- used in school to learn another language or dialect,
including words and their pronunciation, plus how
they are different from the first language

**Linguistically, no grammar is better than others.

Socially, some grammars may be superior to others.
Language Universals
 Phonology (sound system)
 Semantics (meaning system)
 Morphology (word formation system)
 Syntax (sentence formation system)
 Vocabulary of words (dictionary/lexicon)

 Universal grammar
(universal laws/properties of all languages)
The development of grammar
 Acquire vs. learn
 Innate component/blueprint (Universal Grammar)
(evidenced by child’s success and uniformity of
acquisition process)
Language and Thought
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:

 The strongest: linguistic determinism

 The weaker: linguistic relativism: not determine, but

influence
What we know about language?
 Nature, not nurture, of human beings
 None is better than others.
 All change through time.
 Sounds and meanings relationships are mostly
arbitrary.
 Finite sets of sounds to form infinite (words and)
sentences
 Universal rules/properties (e.g. discreteness,
hierarchical structure, sound segments, parts of
speech, genders, speech acts)
Brain and Language (Chapt 1)
 Neurolinguistics: the study of the biological and
neural foundations of language
 Haman Brain
 Composed of 2 hemispheres joined by a network of
fibers called callosum
 The 2 hemispheres control different sides of the body
(contralateral control of functions).
 Different cognitive abilities and behaviors are localized
in specific parts of the brain (localization)
 Different parts of the brain are responsible for different
jobs (modularity), as evidenced in split brains, and
aphasia (language disorders resulting from brain
damage).
 Language is controlled by the left hemisphere.
 Primary localization of cognitive functions to one
hemisphere in the brain = lateralization
 Language may be less lateralized initially.
 If the child’s left hemisphere is damaged, the right one
may help.
 Plasticity = flexibility in the system during the early
stage of language development, decreasing with age and
with the increasing specialization of the regions of the
brain
Aphasia
 Language disorder resulted from brain damage
 Different language MISuse, depending on what part of
the brain is affected: Broca’s area (front left), function
words and syntax; Wernicke’s (temporal left), meaning
The autonomy of language
 Problematic language ability # low cognitive ability
(IQ)
 Evidence: Specific Language Impairment (SLI) vs.
savants
 Language faculty is autonomous and genetically
determined. (same linguistic problems found in many
family members)
Language and Brain Development
 Normal development depends on exposure, not
teaching.
 The Critical Period: The case of Genie in 1970
 After the period, selective acquisition
 Seem to exist in many species
Language Acquisition (Chapt 7)
 Mechanisms of language acquisition
Behaviorism in 1950s, B. F. Skinner one of the founders:

- imitation?
(unable to speak but able to learn and understand)

- correction and reinforcement?

(if occurring, what is actually corrected by parents?)
 - analogy? (using input as a model for application)
Input: Is the boy sleeping? Is the girl crying?
No output: *Is the boy who sleeping is dreaming?

- structured input?
Motherese/child-directed speech/baby talk
Children around the world acquire language in much the
same way even though they are in different
circumstances/environments.
What actually happens?
 Children are creative in language acquisition.
 Children go through stages of acquisition.
 Children make some kinds of errors, but not others.
 Children construct grammars.
 Language acquisition is a creative process.
 Children are equipped with an innate template to
acquire language (UG).
The Innateness Hypothesis
 Successful language users in spite of:
- poverty of the stimulus (not enough input if
compared with what is acquired)
- impoverished data (no input of what is acquired)
The hypothesis says:
Children ‘extract’ language-specific rules of grammar
from the environment with the help of UG.
Children construct their grammar according to an innate
blueprint and go through similar developmental
stages.
Universal stages in language
acquisition
Born with the ability to perceive and produce
An on-going process:
 Babbling
 First words (holophrastic stage)
 Phrases/sentences (conforming to the rules acquired
at each particular point)

 Ability to segment the continuous speech stream into

discrete units
The development of grammar
 Biologically equipped to acquire all grammatical
aspects (i.e., phonology, morphology, syntax,
semantics, and pragmatics)

 The acquisition of phonology:

start with comprehension and then production of
unmarked sounds, CV constructions, and creation of
phonological rules

 The acquisition of morphology:

- regular rules acquisition and over-generalize them
 The acquisition of word meaning:
- Similar in all children, starting with overextension, and
sometimes under-extension
(dogs for dogs and cats; birds for flying birds only)

 The acquisition of syntax:

- start with comprehension, and production of more
content words than function words (telegraphic stage),
but almost never violate word order rules

 The acquisition of pragmatics:

- take longer time to acquire pronoun references
Knowing more than one
language
 Second vs. bilingual language acquisition
 Bilingualism: speaking more than one language as a
native language (having regular and continued
exposure); mixing two languages at early stages of
acquisition, due to lexical gaps and codeswitching
- construct multiple grammars from the start
- develop their grammars like monolinguals do (going
through the same stages of acquisition)
“two monolinguals in one head”
Second Language Acquisition
 Acquire L2 AFTER L1 acquisition

Is it the same as L1 acquisition?

 Requires conscious attention
 Intense study and memorization
 Not achieve native-like competence, esp regarding
pronunciation (e.g. having an accent, making syntactic
and morphological errors, having wrong word orders)
 Fossilize = teaching and correction don’t help
 Different degrees of acquisitions among individuals
(unlike L1 acquisition; everyone can be a native speaker
of their first language)
 Variations depend on many factors, like age, talent,
motivation, and environment.

 What are similarities between L1 and L2 acquisition?

- no overnight acquisition
- going through stages of development (interlanguage
grammars: rule-governed, changing)
L1 influence in SLA
 Prominent in early stages
 Positive vs. negative transfer
 Transfer found in both production and perception of
all linguistic aspects
 Most obvious transfer found in phonology: phonemes,
phonological rules, syllable structures
The creative component of SLA
 Many rules found in interlanguage are not the same as
those of L1.
 The created rules change through the stages of
development.
A critical period for SLA?
 Age is important, but there can be exceptions.
 Ability usually declines with age.
 There are ‘sensitive periods” for some aspects of L2.
 The shortest period is for phonology.
 L2 acquisition affects brain structures too.
Language Processing (Chapt 7)
 Psycholinguistics concerns with:
- Linguistic performance (how we use of linguistic
competence) in language production and
comprehension
- Describing the processes people normally use in using
and understanding language
What happens when we speak?
 Access our mental lexicon to find the words
 Use the rules of grammar to construct novel sentences
and to produce the sounds that express the message
we want to convey
What happens when we listen?
 Segment sounds into units
 Access the mental lexicon and grammar to assign a
structure and meaning to the sounds we hear
 If ambiguity found, choose the most appropriate
 Interpret
Other psychological processes/mechanisms
involved
 Breaking the continuous stream into linguistic units
 Composing sounds into words
 Pulling words from the mental lexicon
 Constructing a phrase structure representation of the
words we retrieve
These happen unconsciously.
However, we sometimes say/understand something
wrongly.
Spoonerism vs. the garden path
 Language processing involves more than grammar.
Comprehension
 Understand a sentence involves unconscious analysis
at many levels.
 Comprehend each speech sound we hear
 Segment acoustic signals into meaningful units
 Recognize particular speech sounds occurring in
different contexts/spoken by different people as the
same sounds
 L1 influences perception.
The lexical access/word
recognition process
 Searching the mental lexicon for the phonological
string heard; if matched, meaningful
 Knowledge of morphology and syntax helps.
A cat chased rats. Vs. A rat chased cats.
 Knowledge of stress and intonation (prosodic aspects
of language) also helps.
Bottom-up and top-down
models of comprehension
 Both are active, although top-down seems to override.

Bottom-up processes start with the smallest unit.

Top-down processes start from semantic and syntactic
information to the lexical information.
Evidence: we predict what will come next in the signals.
We don’t wait till the speaker finishes to respond.
Shadowing experiments: Not really repeating what one
hears.
Hear what is not there in the input.
Context plays a role. Grade A vs. Grey Day. Night rate
vs. Nitrate
Lexical access and word
recognition
 When we hear words, all meanings of a word are
accessed even when the context calls for one meaning
(evidenced by ambiguous word interpretation).
 This claim is for the bottom-up process.
 We recognize words that are regularly spelled faster
than the irregular ones, meaning the mind notices
irregularity.
Syntactic processing
 Figuring out the syntactic and semantic relations
among the words and phrases in the sentence =
parsing, largely determined by the grammar rules and
word order = doing it while lisytening
 Garden path sentences
 After the child visited the doctor prescribed a course of
injections.
 He told me that she will go there yesterday.
 Memory capacity also plays a role in sentence
comprehension. (Look at P.386)
 Fast shadowers (in sentence processing experiments)
often unconsciously correct speech errors or
mispronunciations (supporting top-down processing)

 Ability to comprehend is based on:

- the internal grammar
- frequency factors
- memory
- context (both linguistic and non-linguistic)
Speech Production
 Conceptualize the message before it is said
(evidenced by spoonerism, slip of the tongue)

 Morphological and syntax rules are applied when

speaking (evidenced by wrong application of rules,
e.g., swam vs. swimmed)
Non-linguistic influence on
production and perception
 State of the mind
 Similarities between what is said and what is intended
to be said
Phonetics (Chapter 4)
Phonology (Chapter 5)
Morphology (Chapter 1)
 What is a word?
 What do you know when you know a word?
 What is a mental lexicon/dictionary?
 What is in it?
- sounds and meanings
- grammatical categories/syntactic classes
- orthography
- homonyms (homophones)
- etc.
Content vs. function words
 Content/open class:
- Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs

 Function/closed class:
- pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners
Morphemes
 Minimal (can’t be decomposed) units of meaning

Again,
morphology = word formation “system” = rule-governed

Words have internal structure, going through word

formation process, e.g. prefixing, and suffixing.

How is “Ungrammaticality’ formed?

A morpheme
 A minimal (the smallest) unit of meaning
 Can be:
- a sound
- a syllable
- more than one syllable
- a word (at the maximum)
Note: A word may contain more than one morpheme.

Morphological knowledge = knowledge of individual

morphemes and the rules that combine them
Bound vs. free morphemes
 Bound morphemes (affixes):
- prefixes
- suffixes
- (infixes)
- (circumfixes)
 Free morphemes (monomorphemic words)
A root
 A “content” morpheme that can no longer be analyzed
into smaller units of meaning
 May or may not stand as a word
 Bound roots (e.g. –ceive, -mit, huckle-, luke-)

A stem
 A “meaningful” unit (of one or more morphemes)
to which an affix can be added
 A morpheme’s meaning must be constant.

 Two different morphemes may be

pronounced the same. (e.g. –er = person
who does, or = more

 Some morphemes may sound like a part of

other morphemes. (e.g. singer vs. father;
underestimate vs. understand)
Rules/Processes of word
formation
 Derivation (adding a derivational morpheme)
- derivational morphemes
- creating a new (derived) words/dictionary entry
(mostly of a new grammatical category/part of speech)
- a list and how to use present in our mental
lexicon
- Hierarchical (internal) structure of words
- Morphemes are added in a fixed order.
- How is “unsystematically” formed?
- Our morphological knowledge makes us know:
1. What combination is possible or not.
2. Whether the derived word is ambiguous
(having more than one internal structure, and thus
more than one meaning (e.g. unlockable vs.
unlockable).

Structure is important to determining meaning.

Lexical/accidental gaps = well-formed but not existing

words, e.g. unactive,
imbeautiful
Rule productivity
 Some morphological rules may be more or less
productive (e.g., un- vs. –th, as in warmth).
Rules/Processes of word
formation (continued)
 Word coinage (created outright to fit some purpose)
through, for example:
1. adopting some part of existing words
(e.g. Jello, Kleenex)
2. reordering the letters of existing words
(e.g. Jarunee -> Jeeruna
3. Borrowing Greek roots (thermos + metron)
Compounds
 What are they?
 How to write them?
 Their heads (carrying the broad meaning and word
category, except for prepositions)
 What is the head and where?
 Their internal structure (a top hat rack)
 How to pronounce them?
 Their universal property
Meaning of compounds
 the same as their components’ (a hat rack)
 somewhat different from their components’ (The
White House)
 totally different from their components’ (A jack-in-a-
box = a kind of tree)
Acronyms
 What are they? Initials of several words
 How to pronounce? Like a word or each letter
 Invented daily

 ASEAN association of south-east asian nations

 Ubu
 la
Back formations
 Result from incorrect morphological analyses (e.g. edit
from editor)
Abbreviations (clipping)
 Shortened forms of longer words (not acronyms)
 may finally become a word (e.g. fax and piano)
Words from names (eponyms)
 e.g. sandwich, robot, jumbo
Blends
 less than compounds (some parts of the components
missing)
 e.g. smog, motel, brunch
Grammatical morphemes
 What are they?
- morphemes that have no clear concept
associated with them (can be free or bound)
 Free: e.g. to (+V), have (+V3), be (+Ving)
= functional words or the closed class
 Bound: Inflectional morphemes
 Inflectional vs. derivational morphemes
What are inflectional morphemes?
 bound morphemes that have only grammatical
functions: e.g. marking tenses, and number
 never change the syntactic category of the morphemes
they are attached to, except for the one marking
possession (e.g. Malee (n), but Malee’s = determiner
 never form a new entry in the dictionary
8 inflectional morphemes in English
 marking tenses/aspects
1. -s
2. -ed
3. –ing
4. -en
 marking numbers
5. -s
 marking possession
6. -‘s
 marking degrees
7. –er
8. -est
Exceptions and suppletions
(irregulars)
 the inflectional morphemes may not be applied
Morphology and syntax
 Some concept may be expressed both morphologically
(inflectionally) and syntactically (using free
grammatical morphemes).
 Thailand’s prime minister = The prime minister of
Thailand
 He is happier than she is. = He is more happy than she
is.
 The barking dog is mine. = The dog that barks is mine.
 She loves children. = She is a lover of children.
 See summary figure on p. 104.

 Practice/review by doing exercises 2,

3, and 4 on p. 109, 12A and 14 on p. 113.

**********
Syntax (Chapter 2)
Syntax: The sentence patterns
of language
 syntax = knowledge/study of sentences and their
structures

 structure (roughly) = word order

 “rules” of syntax

 grammatical (well-formed) vs. ungrammatical (ill-

formed)
- sequence/order of words conforming (vs. not
conforming) to the rules of syntax
What grammaticality is based on
 word order (syntactic rules)
 what is needed with what (syntactic rules)
 Decide if the sentences in 1-4 on p. 119 are
grammatical.
What grammaticality is NOT based
on
 sentence’s meaningfulness/truth conditions
An adjective is flying very quickly in the water.
 Untrue sentences can be grammatical.
What else do you know about syntax?
 Sentence ambiguity
 Sentence hierarchical structure
 Structural ambiguity: “I saw small boys and girls.”
 Grammatical relations of words in sentences
(word order knowledge):
“Sam loves Jane.” vs. “Jane loves Sam.”
The roles of syntactic rules in a
grammar
 Determine:
1. sentence grammaticality
2. word order
3. sentence hierarchical organization
4. grammatical relations of words
5. whether different structures have different or the
same meaning
6. language creativity
Sentence structure
 Syntactic rules determine word order and how words
are grouped in a sentence.
 Tree diagrams
 Constituents: natural groupings in a sentence
 Constituent structure: represented as a tree structure

 Ways to test constituents:

1. pronouns (for NPs) 2. “do” (for VPs)
3. “so” (for that-Cl/CPs) 4. movement
5. there/then (for PPs)
 Ambiguous sentences: having more than one
constituent structure
 “Little Susie ate the cake on the table.”
Syntactic categories (universal)
 What are they?
- Groups of words in sentences based on their
functions
 Include:
1. all parts of speech
1.1 lexical categories (e.g. n, v, adj, adv)
1.2 functional categories (e.g. aux, det, prep, conj)
2. all phrase types/phrasal categories
(NP, VP, AdjP, AdvP, PP)
3. the whole sentence (S)
Phrase/constituent structure trees
 A tree diagram with syntactic category information
 Three aspects of our syntactic knowledge are
presented in the tree:
1. the word order
2. the grouping of words in each category (node)
3. the hierarchical structure of the categories
 Every higher node “dominates” all the categories below
it.
 “immediately dominate”?
 sisters?
Heads and complements
 Head = what the entire phrase refers to
 Complements = other constituents in a phrase that
make the meaning of the phrase complete
 Every category can have complements.
 The head-complement relation is universal: all
languages have phrases that are headed and that
contain complements.
 However, the order of the two constituents may be
different across languages.
(complement) Selection
 What is needed/not needed as complements
 Depend on head’s property
 Verbs: Vt (+NP), vi, put (+NP+PP), think (+S), tell
(+NP+S), feel (+Adj./S)
 Nouns: belief (+PP, in), (+s)
 Adjectives: sick/tired (+PP)
 Some selectional properties are optional: can appear
with no complements
 Knowledge of “optional or obligatory” contained in the
lexicon
Two factors determining
phrases’ well-formedness
 Phrase structure requirements

 Selectional requirements of the head

What heads the sentence?
 Auxiliaries: inflection indicating a time frame and S-V
agreement
 To better express the idea, S = IP, Aux = IFL
 S -> NP Aux VP OR IP -> NP INFL VP
 In sentences with no auxiliary, the tense (indicated
under Aux or INFL) is the head.
 See pp.133-135 trees.
The infinity of language
 A sentence can be indefinitely long.

 Categories are indefinitely repeated within categories.

 Universal property

 Language creativity
Phrase structure rules
 definite in numbers

 precisely and concisely specify language structure (e.g.

phrase components, and head-complement order)
NP -> (Det) (Adj) N (PP)

 generating trees; trees: reflecting knowledge of rules

(See the trees on page 139)
Growing trees: The relationship
between phrase structure rules
and trees
 Rules generate trees; trees represent rules.

 See examples of rule and tree relationships on pp. 140-

142.
Structural ambiguity
 A sentence having more than one phrase structure
tree, thus, more than one meaning

 See the trees on pp. 143-144, in which the PP is

generated by different rules

 The syntactic rules allow different structures for the

same word order.
Trees that won’t grow
 strings of words that violate phrase structure rules
More Phrase structure rules:
 coordinate structures (See the tree on p. 147.)
 s = v complement = CP (complementizer phrase)
- A sentence embedded in a larger sentence
- a complementizer = a word that changes a
sentence into a complement (e.g. that,
if, whether)
(See the tree on page 150.)
 See summary of phrase structure rules covered so
far on page 150.
Sentence relatedness
 How sentences are related:
1. same phrase structure, but different words and
meaning
2. same words, but different meanings
(different structures or ambiguous sentences)
3. different structures, but same meaning
4. different structures, and different meanings, but
syntacticly related
(e.g. statements and questions, actives and
passives )
Transformational rules
 Rules that change deep (underlying) structures to
surface structure
 deep structures = basic declarative structures created
by phrase structure rules
 surface structures = what we actually say/write, after
going through transformational processes (applying
transformational rules)
 If no transformational rules are applied, the deep and
surface structures are the same.
Basic transformational rules
 moving

 adding

 deleting
Structure dependent rules
 rules that are applied to sentence structures, not word
order or words’ selectional requirements

 Transformational rules are structure dependent.

Examples of transformational rules
1. PP preposing/moving
(fronting the PP immediately under the VP, not NP)

Ambiguous sentences will become not ambiguous.

The boy saw the man with the telescope. (ambiguous)

With the telescope, the boy saw the man. (not

ambiguous)
2. That-deletion/omission
Complementizer “that” may be omitted only when
the CP functions as a verb complement (in a VP), not
as the subject of the sentence (under the subject NP
node).

3. Subject-verb agreement
The verb has an –s only when the subject is 3rd
person singular.
The verb (in the VP) must agree with the head
noun in the NP subject position (the NP immediately
below the S), no matter how many words/nouns may
come in between.
4. Auxiliary movement/fronting/inversion
Move the aux immediately dominated by the S
(not necessarily the first Aux in the sentence) to the
front of the NP subject in yes/no questions.

Structure dependency is a principle of Universal

Grammar (UG), and is found in all languages.
Syntactic dependencies
 Like the case of phrase well-formedness, sentence
well-formedness depends on two basic principles:
constituent structures and syntactic dependencies
(selectional requirements of the head, for the case of
phrases).

 syntactic dependency = the presence of a

word/morpheme depends on the presence of another
word/morpheme in the sentence
Examples of syntactic dependency rules
1. selection
2. agreement
3. a gap after a VT when there is a wh-phrase at the
beginning of the sentence
What do you want to eat _____?
What he likes _____ is unknown.
4. Move/invert Aux (in question structures), not
relevant to words
Wh-questions
 the wh-element originated (in the deep structure) in
the gap position of an NP node
 the wh-element moves to the front of the sentence by a
transformational rule: Wh-movement rule
 wh-questions are CPs
1. Move wh-element to the comp position of the CP.
2. Move the Aux to the front of, or invert it with the
subject NP (Aux-movement rule).
3. If there is no overt Aux, insert “do” (do support
rule).
Look at page 158.
UG Principles and Parameters
 Principles: basic structures of all languages (acquired
naturally)

 Parameters: points of variation within the same

principle (language specific properties; need to be
learned)

 Examples are phrase structures and word order within

the phrase.
*****************************************************
Semantics (Chapter 3)
 “linguistic/literal” meaning of morphemes, words,
phrases, and sentences
 Lexical semantics: meanings and meaning
relationships of words
 Phrasal or sentential semantics: the meaning and
meaning relationships of syntactic units larger than
the word
Lexical semantics
 Semantic properties:
- meaning components that make a word similar
or different from others
e.g. man vs. boy, actor vs. actress
- exist in the lexicon
 Semantic classes: containing words that share a
semantic property
 Semantic features: a way to represent the presence
(+X) or absence (-X) of semantic properties
 See examples on page 177.
 What are examples of properties, classes, and features?
Examples:
Properties: female, male, young, old
Classes: female (containing words like mother,
sister, daughter, aunt)
male (containing words like father,
brother, son, uncle)
Features: +female, -female, +male, -male, +young
More semantic relationships
Consider the words “pour, drink, leak, droplet.” Are
they related? How? What property is relevant?

- Words are related to each other in many ways.

- The relationship is indicated by words ending with
the bound morpheme –nym.
- What does “-nym” mean?
Semantic relationships
 Homonyms (homophones): words whose pronunciation is the
same as another word, e.g., bank vs. bank, flour vs. flower

 A polysemy (a polysemous word): a word that has many “but

conceptually or historically” related meanings
e.g. date ( a verb, a noun, relevant to time; not a fruit)
- “Date” relevant to time is polysemous.
- “Date” is also a homonym (relevant to time and a fruit)
 Heteronyms: spelled the same, but pronounced and
means differently, e.g. dove vs. dove, bow vs. bow

 Homographs: spelled the same, but different

meanings, e.g. dove vs. dove, bow vs. bow
Note: “Flour” and “flower” are homonyms,
not homographs.
(See summarizing table on page 180.)
 Synonyms (no perfect synonyms though)
The degree of semantic similarity depends on the number of
semantic properties shared.

 A partial synonym: a polysemous word one of whose meanings

is similar to another word’s meaning,
e.g. mature and ripe are polysemous words (why?) and are also
partially synonymous when talking about fruit, but not animal

 Some opposite words can become synonyms in some context.

(e.g. fat vs. slim chance)

 When synonyms occur in otherwise identical sentences, the

sentences are paraphrases.
 Antonyms: words that are opposite in meaning,
sharing all, but one semantic property (e.g., tall,
vs. short, but not police vs. thief)

 Kinds of antonyms:
1. complementary (e.g., dead vs. alive)
2. gradable (adjectives, e.g., fat vs. thin)
- The meaning of the adjs depends on the
object they modify; the adjs have no clear scale.
- The negative of one word is not the same
as the other of the gradable pairs.
- One is marked, and the other is not.
 3. Ralational: the antonyms are related, showing symmetry in
the meaning (e.g., give vs. receive, teacher vs. student)
- Comparative forms of gradable pairs form
relational pairs.

4. Autoantonyms

 How to form antonyms for adjectives: adding prefixes

 Antiautonyms: “not” prefixes added but not opposite meaning

resulted (e.g., valuable, vs. invaluable)
 Hyponyms: subsets of a more general word
(e.g. son and daughter are hyponyms of children)

 Metonyms: words replacing the referred-to objects

the name of an attribute or concept
associated with that object

 Retronyms: once-used-and-then-not-used
compounds which are used again
Proper names
 Referring to a specific entity
 Linguistic universal

 Usually:
 1. have no “literal” meaning
 2. not preceded by articles
 3. not pluralized
 4. not preceded by adjectives
Phrase and sentence meaning
 Principle of compositionality:
The meaning of a phrase or sentence depends
both on the meaning of its words and how those words
are combined structurally.
 Two words may be synonyms; two sentences may be
paraphrases (containing or not containing
synonymous words).
 Sentences may be ambiguous when spoken if they
contain homonyms.
 Words have antonyms; sentences can be negated.
Phrasal or sentential semantics
 The study of how word meanings combine into phrase
and sentence meanings, and the meaning
relationships among these larger units

 Phrasal meaning  meaning of individual words +

rules for combining their meanings
- sensitive to sentence structure
Noun-centered meaning
 Semantic rules of interpretation are sensitive to
sentence structure:
- “the smart boy” talks about a boy, not the quality
of being smart
- the top hat vs. the hat top
Semantic rules of adjective-noun
combinations
 Adjectives with relative concepts are interpreted
differently, e.g., a big elephant vs. a big mosquito

 Adding semantic properties, e.g., small (for), big (for)

a bird

 Cancelling the properties, e.g., false (vs.real) teeth

 Not telling the properties, e.g., alleged thief

 Meaning of NPs with a PP modifier
semantic rules for prepositions = two NPs are
related and their relationship is determined by the
meaning of the preposition

 Meaning of compound nouns

 Meanings build on meanings.

For example, meanings of NPs come from
meaning combination of nouns, adjectives,
determiners, and even a sentence (CP) as in relative
clauses.
Sense vs. reference of NPs
 Referent = the object that the NP points to/talks
about
 The NP has reference (extension), the act of
pointing to or talking about some referent.
 NPs (of ??different?? meanings, or sense,) may be co-
referential: referring to the same thing.
 Sense (intension) = (additional) linguistic meaning
of NPs
 Proper names: (usually) only reference intended, but
sometimes also contain sense (meaning).

เพรียวเป็ นเด็กดี
 Some proper nouns have only reference, but not sense.

เอินเป็ นเด็กดี
 Some common NPs have only sense, but not reference.
The president of Thailand is here today.
Verb-centered meaning
 Verbs are the most important part of the sentence, in
terms of both meaning and structure.

 Verbs limit object numbers (e.g., vi., vt., vd.), and

semantic properties of their subjects and objects (e.g.,
for the verb “eat,” the subject must be a living entity,
and the object must be something edible.
Thematic roles
 Relationships between the verb and its subject and
object
 The relationship depends on the MEANING of the
verb.
 This knowledge is in our lexicon.
 Examples of thematic roles: (see pages 192-3)
agent, theme, location, source, goal, instrument,
experiencer, causative, possessor
 Thematic roles of a verb never change, regardless of
sentence structures.
 The assignment happens at deep structure.
I kicked the ball. = The ball was kicked by me.
I opened the door. = The door opened.

 Subjects need not be “doers.” It may also lack roles,

e.g. It is raining.
The theta-criterion
 Theta assignment = the process of assigning thematic
roles (spreading info from the verb to its relevant NPs)
e.g., Theta assignment assigns ‘Location’ to ‘Bangkok’
in the sentence “I live in Bangkok.”

 The assignment happens at deep structure, not

affected by transformational rules.
For a grammatical sentence,

 All NPs in the sentence must have a thematic role, and

 A theta-criterion says a particular thematic role may be

assigned only once in the sentence.
Sentential meaning
 Principle of compositionality: the meaning of a
sentence comes from the meaning of its NPs and VPs.
 Like NPs, sentences have sense (intension).
 The sense makes you know when (under what
circumstances) the sentence is true (truth
conditions).
 Certain sentences also have reference (extension),
meaning can be judged if it is true or false.
 The extension (reference) is true if the sentence is
true, and false, if false.
 For example:
“ John was here.”
This sentence has sense because we know that the
sentence is true if John was here, and not, if he was not
(its truth conditions).

This sentence also has reference as it can be judged if

it is true or false.
The truth of sentences
 Truth conditions = sense = intension = meaning
 To say if a sentence is true or false, we compare their
truth conditions (meaning, sense, or intension) with
the real world.
 Its being true or false = its truth value = its reference
(extension)
 We can understand a well-formed sentence (know its
sense/intension/meaning) without knowing its truth
value (reference/extension).
 Knowing truth conditions # knowing the facts
 Knowing the truth conditions enables us to examine
the world and learn the facts.

 The sense of a sentence is determined by the semantic

rules that allow us to combine the sentence’s subparts.
Paraphrases
 Two sentences are paraphrases if they have the same
truth conditions (sense, meaning, intension).

 If one is true, the other must be true as well.

(see examples on page 197.)

 Most, not all, active and passive voices are paraphrases.

 “Quantifiers” make a difference.
Every person speaks two languages.
Vs.
Two languages are spoken by every person.

 Transformations don’t change thematic roles, to keep

the original meaning.

 Paraphrases can be formed using different words and

structures.
Entailment
 Entail = necessarily imply
 If sentence A entails sentence B, it means the truth of
sentence A necessarily implies the truth of sentence
B also.
 “Maria is pregnant.” necessarily implies “Maria is
female.”
 If A is true, B must be true too.
 (If A is false, B may or may not be false.)
 Maria is not pregnant. Maria is female.
Contradiction
 = negative entailment

 The truth of one sentence necessarily implies the

falseness of another.

 I am pregnant. I am a man.
Events vs. states
 Eventive verbs can be (while stative can’t):
1. passivized
2. progressive
3. imperative
4. used with some adverbs
Pronouns and coreferentiality
 Pronouns vs. reflexive pronouns
 The antecedent of any reflexive and the reflexive must occur
within the same S/IP in the phrase structure tree.
 Reflexives can’t be the subject of S.
 *I like me. Vs. I like myself.
 If pronouns and their coreferents are in the same sentence, the
pronoun must be in a “lower” sentence in the CP.
 Jack knows that he is short. Vs. That he is short bothers Jack.
To mean or not to mean
 3 ways in which meaning may not be clear/present:

 Anomaly (anomalous): grammatical but no sense and

nonsense, representing

 Metaphor (nonliteral, indirect, but creative meaning)

 Idioms (the meaning is irrelevant to the meaning of its

part, violating principle of compositionality)
Anomaly: no sense and nonsense
 Strange (anomalous) in terms of meaning
 Following syntactic rules, but violating semantic ones
 Clash of semantic properties
= Nonsense
This wingless adjective flies very fast.
That tree slept that doll last night.
 Uninterpretable = No sense, containing words that
have no meaning (nonsense words)
That man looks really vook today.
Metaphor
 Important part of language creativity
 Its literal meaning is used to mean something else,
creating implicit comparison.
 Usually appear anomalous if interpreted literally
She is the apple of my eye.
Time flies. Walls have ears.
 To understand metaphors, we need to know both the
literal meaning and the real world.
 Culturally influenced
Idioms (see examples on p. 206)
 Fixed phrases

 Meaning is not from each individual word.

 Acting like one morpheme: not decomposable

 Have a meaning that must be learned.

Pragmatics (Chapter 3)
 Language use and interpretation of linguistic meaning
in context
 Two kinds of contexts:
1. Linguistic (discourse), as in the case of pronoun
interpretations
2. Situational (the knowledge of the world), including
who is talking to whom about what, when and where
Linguistic context: Discourse
 What is discourse?

 The study of discourse = discourse analysis: how speakers

combine sentences into a broader unit

 “How” involves things like style, appropriateness, cohesiveness,

rhetorical force, topic/subtopic structure, differences between
types of genres

 Many aspects of discourse can affect linguistic meaning

interpretation, e.g., pronouns and articles
Pronouns
 When to use? The (NP) referent (antecedent) may or
may not be present in the immediate discourse.
 Within and beyond sentences, including the entity
first talked about in the sentence/discourse
 Limitation of occurrence if occurring within the same
sentence??
 Bound = coreferential with an NP in the discourse,
including the speaker (I) and the hearer (you)
 Free (unbound) = referring to NPs not mentioned in
the discourse; its referent is recovered from the
situational context.
 Reflexives are always bound. Why?

 Pronoun(phrases)
I saw a little dog this morning. He looked hungry.

 Pro-verb(phrases)
Sam likes oranges, and Sally does too.

 Pro-sentences
I need to take Introduction to Language, which I
really don’t like.
 Some phrases may be omitted in the discourse, but the
sentence is still understood, depending on the context.
Write T if the statement is true, and
F if (XXX) false.
 The process is called gapping.

 But it is called sluicing if the omitted part is after wh-

word in embedded sentences
John did not come to class today. I think I know why.
The articles The and A
 Using a/n or the depends on the context.
 Use “the” when the referent is known to the
interlocutors.
 Use “a/n” when unknown (gapping here, remember?)
 A/n has two meanings:
 1. = one having only one referent
 2.= many having many references

He loves a dog. (= a particular dog, or any dog (= He loves

dogs.), meaning depends on the context
Situational context
 Who is taking to whom about what, where and when

 Meaning depends on the real world situation at the

speaking time

 Real world context influences and interacts with

meaning in several ways.
Maxims of conversation
 = Conversational conventions = what we stick to and
assume others do too when conversing (subparts of
Cooperative principle)
1. Maxim of quality
2. Maxim of quantity
3. Maxim of relevance
4. Maxim of manner (brief, orderly, not ambiguous,
not obscure)
These influence meaning and interpretation in context.
 Violating the maxims? Resulting in implicatures
Speech acts
 Use language to do things, without acting anything
else physically; just say it (using performative verbs)
and something is accomplished when finishing
speaking.

 Warn, promise, challenge, nominate, fine, resign, etc.

 All are present tense declaratives of the subjects “I” or

“we.”
 Speech acts can happen with no explicit performative
verb; implicit performance

 Meaning depends on context.

“Police” can be a warning.

 The underlying purpose = the illocutionary force of

the speech act, depending on context, so being a part
of pragmatics
Presuppositions/Implication
 Implicit assumptions before saying
 Facts/truth required for an utterance to be appropriate
 Backward implications
 Backward implied messages
 The “sense” of an utterance depends on those
assumptions.
 Different from entailment
Presuppositions (Implications)
vs. entailment
 Entailment:
If what we say (A) is true, what it entails (B) must be
true too (necessarily implies).
“Michael is pregnant.” necessarily implies “Michael is
female”
If what we say (A) is not true, what it “entails” (B) can
be either true or false.
“Michael is not pregnant.” Michael can be either male
or female.
 Presupposition:
If what we say (A) is true, what it presupposes (B)
must be true too (implies).
“Jane is pregnant.” presupposes/implies that “there is
a person named Jane.”

But, unlike entailment, if what we say (A) is not true,

what it presupposes (B) is still true.
“Jane is not pregnant.” There still is a person named
Jane.
Deixis
 Linkers between utterance and time, place, and person
(time, place and person pointers)
 Relying on situational context only; linguistic
context is not relevant.
 1st and 2nd person pronouns are deictic as their referent
depends on the “situational” context of who is
speaking to whom.
 3rd person pronouns (except for dummy “it”) are
deictic only when it is “free”. Why? What does “free”
mean?
Examples of deixis
 Person: this person, that person, free-she, free-he,
free-they

 Place: here, there, this city, that place, left, right,

above, under

 Time: today, this year, now, two weeks ago, next month

Apply today!
Sociolinguistics (Chapter 9)
 Idiolect: What is it, and what affects it?
age, sex, size, speech rates, emotion, mood,
health, word choices, pronunciation, and grammar
rules

 Dialect: What is it? Systematical differences within

the ‘same’ language; not inferior; language’s
components: group’s language

 Groups: based on what?

economic status, region, race, education, career,
etc
 Mutually intelligible

 But mutual intelligibility = two languages or two

dialects?

 Politics plays a crucial role.

 Regional dialect: a kind of dialect

 Accents: phonetic/phonological distinctions within

the ‘same’ language, revealing speakers’ dialects,
including non-native accents
Dialects of English
 Phonological: car, hotel
 Lexical: same word, different meanings; different
words, same meaning: football, lift, footpath,
apartment
 Spelling: colour, travelling, realise,
 Morphological: verb conjugation: learnt, gotten
mass/plural: criteria, data
 Syntactic: Have/Did…yet? Have you/Do you have?

The differences are minor when we compare the whole

system.
(Regional) Dialectal atlases
 Dialect maps showing differences across areas, based
on different word choices and pronunciation

 Dialect areas: areas of different dialects

 An isogloss: a line drawn on the map to separate areas

“Standard” language
 A dialect!
Used by “prestige/superior” groups of people in
the society; taught in school; closed to the written
language

 Usually idealistic, nobody really speaks it, e.g. the case

of Standard American English.

 Prescriptive grammarians/language purists: their

roles?
 Deviations are not allowed. = day dreams
 Functions of the “standard” dialect:
1. bind speakers together
2. provide common written form
3. “norm” for social judgments

 Banned languages

 Revived languages

 Mostly due to politics

African American English
 Phonological:
- coda r/l-deletion: car-> ka, help -> hep
- coda cluster simplification: walked -> wak
- diphthong reduction: boy
- loss of interdental fricatives: think, although
 Syntactic:
- double negatives
- “be” deletion, when it can be contracted in
‘standard’ English-- not at the end of sentences
(See examples on p. 462.)
Habitual (vs. present) “be”
 Habitual state: use uninflected “be”
He be lazy.

 Present state: no be
He lazy.
Styles, slang, and jargon
 Styles or registers (situational dialects): variation
depending on the situation (The two extreme
variations are formal and informal.)

 Many cultures including Thai have social behavior

rules to control styles (e.g, the case of pronouns I and
you, and “eat”).
Slang
 Colloquial language
 Used often in informal styles
 Many ways to create:
1. recombining old words into new meanings
2. New words coinage
3. Old words, but new meaning (e.g. Pratuang)
 Not fully accepted in the society
 Sometimes difficult to tell if a word is really regular or
slang.
 Different across areas

 May become standard; one generation’s slang is

another’s standard lexical item

 May die out

Jargon and (or) Argot
 Sets of words used in particular fields or professions
 Some of these words are sometimes called slang or
technical terms, depending on the status of the
speaker.
 Specialized vocabulary
 May finally become standard vocab (understood by
common (outside profession) speakers of the
language)
Language, sex, and gender
 Language reflects what people (as individuals and as
members of society) think.
 Language reflects sexism in society if the society is
sexist.
 Nonlinguistic aspects of society affect our
interpretation of word meanings.
My relative is the chairman of that big company.
Is the speaker’s relative a man or a woman? Why?
 A sexist language contains words that differentiate
people of different sexes/genders. A group is
considered lower or inferior to another.
 Language asymmetry between different groups of
people in society
 Marked vs. unmarked forms
 Unmarked implies common, usually the base form of
word (See examples on page 484.)
 What sex is “common,” words referring to them are the
base, to which an affix can be added to mean a person
of the other sex. s/he, men/women/man, เพศผู ้
ผูคน
้ (females included) ผูห้ ญิง (females
only)
 Names used to call unfamiliar married males and
females (the husband’s last name)
 Some male/female terms’ meanings are
interestingly different: wife/husband,
housewife/househusband?, governor/governess
(taking care of children), นายทาส/นาง
ทาส
 The generic “he” is another interesting case,
referring to both men and women.
 What has been going on = attempt to change the
language; new words of no sexism implied have
been invented (e.g chairperson, people (not
Language and gender
 Men and women speak differently in many societies.

 Women seem to use more “proper” language.

 Word choice is different.

 Women speak with higher pitch.

Taboo or not taboo?
 Filthy/beautiful vs. ugly language?
 Filth/beauty vs. ugliness of language?
 Clean vs. dirty language?
 What determines it? The perception of the listener,
influenced by the value in society
 Word acceptance differs across dialects/societies and
time
 Taboo words = words to be avoided/not to be used, at
least in a polite situation; forbidden words
 What an action is taboo (to be avoided, forbidden), the
words referring to that action may become taboo as
well. (e.g. sex, death, politics, religion, age,
occupation)
 When you are not allowed to do something, you are
usually not allowed to talk about that thing as well.
 What is allowed or not allowed to do/talk about in
society reflects the belief of that society.
 Some words may be used in one situation, but not in
others.
 People usually don’t know why some words are taboo.
 Two or more words can have the same meaning (be
synonyms), but one can be taboo, while the other is
considered polite.
 English words of Latin origin are usually considered
high, technical, scientific, “thus clean”; while the local
words are not.
 This reflects the belief in the society that the language
spoken by educated people is considered
high/superior, while that spoken by lower classes is
not.
 There is no reason why “shit” is rude, while “defecate”
is not.
Euphemisms
 Result of the existence of taboo words

 Euphemisms = words or phrases used instead of taboo

ones, to avoid frightening or unpleasant subjects

 Learned from family’s/society’s value; thus, differ

across groups
Important points
 Words are not good or bad by themselves; they reflect
the speaker’s and the society’s values. (For instance, a
very same person may be called a terrorist or a freedom
fighter, depending on who calls him.)
 If a group of speakers is “inferior” in the society due to
some other factor, the dialect they speak is considered
by others in the society as “inferior” as well.
Language change (Chapter 10)
 “Living” languages change, but slowly, with time.

 Changes happen to all linguistic aspects (phonology,

morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, and spelling)
Nature of changes
 Phonology:
- sound deletion (loss)/addition/change
 Morphology:
- deletion (loss)/addition/change of word
formation rules
 Syntax:
- deletion (loss)/addition/change of syntactic
rules
e.g., do not -> don’t; will not -> won’t
(Negations preceded auxiliaries in Old English.)
- more lower, more shorter
 Lexical change:
- deletion (loss)/addition/change of words (and
bound morphemes, e.g. the prefix e-), and lexical
categories
Addition processes:
words from names (eponyms), blends, back-
formations, acronyms, abbreviations/clippings,
derived, compounds, coinage

Borrowings/loanwords
 Pronunciation changes usually occur to fit the
borrowing language’s system
 Loss of words
 Semantic changes:
1. broadening
2. narrowing
3. shifting
 Why do languages change?
1. incorrect acquisition
2. rules become optional
3. borrowing
4. new invention
5. easier pronunciation/uses/rule simplifications
(e.g. regularization of plural forms)
 Heraclitus:
“All is flux, nothing stays still. Nothing endures but
change.”