Linguistics chapter 8 & 10

Linguistics 3rd year 2nd term
المعلومات المطلوبة من الـ

Chapter 10 ( Language in society)
-Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
Dialects
-All speakers of English can talk and understand each other . yet no two speak the same.
-Some differences are due to age, sex, size, speech rates, emotional state, health.
-Idiolect is the unique characteristics of the language of an individual speaker.
-Different groups of people that speak the same language speak it differently.
-We say that each group speaks a dialect of a language when there are systematic differences in the way different groups speak a language.
-Dialect are mutually intelligible forms of language that differ in systematic ways.
-A dialect is not an inferior or degraded form of a language.
-When dialects become mutually unintelligible, when the speakers of one dialect group can no longer understand the speakers of another dialect group.
Regional Dialects-Dialectal diversity develops when people are separated geographically and socially.
-When some communication barrier separates groups of speakers –physical(ocean or mountain)- or –social(political, racial , class) or –religious- linguistic changes don't spread easily and dialectal differences are reinforced.
-Dialect leveling is movement toward greater uniformity and less variation among dialects.
Accents
-Regional phonological or phonetic distinctions are accents.
-Accent refers to the characteristics of speech that convey information about the speaker's dialect.
-Accent refers to phonological differences or ''interference'' from a different language spoken elsewhere.
-Accents don't reflect differences in the language of the community where the language was acquired.
Lexical differences-Regional dialects may differ in the words people use for the same object as well as in phonology. Pail/bucket blinds/shades/curtains buggy/coach/cab lift/elevator.

Syntactic differences-They distinguish dialects.
Lingua franca-Lingua franca is one language used by common agreement.
-Any language can be a lingua franca.
-Lingua franca serve as a trade language.
-Some lingua franca arise naturally, others are developed by government policy and intervention.
Pidgins
-Pidgin is a marginal language.
-There are a number pidgins in the world, including many based on English.
-Although pidgins are rudimentary, they are not devoid of grammar. The phonological system is rule-governed, as in any human language. The inventory of phonemes is generally small, and each phoneme may have many allophonic pronunciation.
-With their small vocabularies, pidgins are not good at expressing fine distinctions of meaning.
-Pidgin has come to have negative connotations, perhaps because the best-known pidgins are all associated with European colonial empires.
-Pidgin have been unjustly maligned: they may serve a useful function.
-Pidgins are rule-governed. If they were not, no one could learn them.
Creoles
-When a pidgin comes to be adopted by a community as its native tongue, and children learn it as a first language, that language is called a Creole.
-The pidgin has been creolized.
-Creoles often arose on slave plantations in certain areas where Africans of many different tribes could communicate only via the plantation pidgin.
-Creoles become fully developed languages, having more lexical items and a broader array of grammatical distinctions than pidgins.
Styles-''Situation dialects'' are called styles or registers.
-Everybody has at least an informal and a formal style.
-In an informal style the rules of contraction are used more often, the syntactic rules of negation and agreement may be altered, and many words don't occur in the formal style.
-Informal styles not permitted in formal speech, are also rule governed.
-Many cultures have rules of social behavior that govern style.
Slang
-The frequent occurrence of slang is one mark of an informal style.
-Slang is defined as ''one of those things that everybody recognize and nobody can define''.
-The use of slang or colloquial language introduces many new words into the language by recombining old words with new meanings(hang-up rip-off).
-Slang introduces entirely new words like barf, flub.
-Slang often consists of ascribing entirely new meaning to old words.
-One generation's slang is another generation's standard vocabulary.
Jargon and Argot-Every science, profession, trade and occupation has its own set of words (some slang and some technical), such words are called jargon or argot.
-Because the jargon used by different professional groups is so extensive and so obscure in meaning ….
-The computer age introduced a huge jargon of ''computerese'' used by computer ''hackers'' –Many jargon terms pass into the standard language.
-Jargon like slang spreads from a narrow group until it is used and understood by a larg segment of the population.
Taboo
-Certain words in all societies are considered taboo, they are not to be used in polite company.
-Forbidden acts or words reflect the particular customs and views of the society. Some words may be used in certain circumstances and not in others.
-In certain societies, words that have religious connotations are considered profane if used outside of formal or religious ceremonies.
-Curses are believed to have magical powers. (hell-damn) are changed to (heck-darn).
Euphemisms-The existence of taboo words and ideas stimulates the creation of euphemisms.
-Euphemism is a word or phrase that replaces a taboo word to avoid frightening or unpleasant subjects. Instead of (die) we have (pass on / pass away) and instead of (morticians/undertakers) we have (funeral directors.
-A word/phrase not only has a linguistic denotative meaning but also a connotative meaning that reflects attitudes, emotions, value judgments….
-Taboo words differ from one child to another depending on the value system accepted in the family/group of the child.
--------------------------------------

Have fun

Linguistics 3rd year 2nd term
المعلومات المطلوبة من الـ
Chapter 8 (Language Acquisition)
-The acquisition of language is doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform.
-The capacity to learn language is deeply ingrained in us as a species, just as the capacity to walk, to grasp objects, to recognize faces. We don't find any serious differences in children growing up in congested urban slums, in isolated mountain villages, or in privileged suburban villas.
-Children seem to act like efficient linguists equipped with a perfect theory of language.
Mechanisms of language acquisition
-Early theories of language acquisition were heavily influenced by behaviorism.
-Behaviorism focused on people's behaviors which are directly observable rather than on the mental systems underlying these behaviors, language was viewed as a kind of verbal behavior.
Do children learn through Imitation
-Children's early words and sentences show that they are not simply imitating adult speech.
-Imitation cannot account for another important phenomenon (children who are unable to speak for neurological or physiological reasons learn the language spoken to them.
Do children learn through Reinforcement
-Children learn to produce correct (grammatical) sentences because they are positively reinforced when they say something right and negatively reinforced when they say something wrong.
-One kind of reinforcement is correction of ''bad grammar'' and reward for ''good grammar''.
-Reinforcement seldom occurs and when it does it usually incorrect pronunciation or incorrect reporting of facts that is corrected.
-Parents corrects ''truth value'' rather than syntactic well-formedness.
-Attempts to correct a child's language are doomed to failure, children don't know what they are doing wrong and are unable to make corrections even when they are pointed out.
Do children learn through Analogy
-Analogy (hearing a sentence and using it as a sample to form other sentences).
-Children seem to know about the structure dependency of rules at a very early age.
Do children learn through Structured Input
-Motherese : is adult speech to children in a special ''simplified'' language or (child directed speech) (CDS) or (baby talk).
-This theory places a lot of emphasis on the role of the environment in facilitating language acquisition.
-Adults typically talk to young children in more slowly and clearly way.
-Controlled studies show that motherese doesn't significantly affect the child's language development.
-Analogy, imitation, and reinforcement cannot account for language development because they are based on the (implicit or explicit) assumption that what the child acquires is a set of sentences or forms rather than a set of grammatical rules.
Children construct grammars
-Language acquisition is a creative process. Children must extract the rules of the grammar from the language they hear around them.
-Observation of children acquiring different languages under different cultural and social circumstances reveal that the development stages are similar, possibly universal.
-Children are equipped with an innate template/blueprint for language universal grammar (UG), and this blueprint aids the child in the task of constructing a grammar for his language, this is called the innateness hypothesis.
The innateness hypothesis
-It receives its strongest support from the observation that the grammar a person ends up with is vastly underdetermined by linguistic experience. (we end up knowing far more about language than is exemplified in the language we hear around us. This argument for the innateness of UG is called the poverty of the stimulus.
-Although children hear many utterances, the language they hear is incomplete, noisy, and unstructured. The data children are exposed to is impoverished.
-The rules children construct are structure dependent.
-Children aren't told about structure dependency or constituent structure, the input they get is a sequence of sounds, not a set of phrase structure trees.
-In all languages that linguists have investigated, a coordinate structure constraint is part of the grammar.
-According to the innateness hypothesis the child extracts from the linguistic environment those rules of grammar that are language specific like (word order and movement rules), he doesn't need to learn universal principles like structure dependency and the coordinate structure constraint or general rules of sentence formation. They are part of the innate blueprint for language that children use to construct the grammar of their language.
-The innateness hypothesis provides an answer to the logical problem of language acquisition .
-It predicts that all languages will conform to the principles of UG.

Stages in language acquisition
-The process of language acquisition is fast but not instantaneous. From first words to virtual adult competence takes 3 to 4 years.
-The stages are similar, possibly universal. Some stages may overlap for a short period.
The earliest studies of child language acquisition come from diaries kept by parents.-
-The studies show that child language is not just a degenerate form of adult language.
-Like adults children have grammatical categories such as NP VP.
-Children's early utterances may not completely resemble comparable adult sentences. Because the words and sentences the child produces conform to the phonology, morphology, and syntax that he has developed to that point.
The perception and production of speech sounds
-The mind appears to be attuned at birth to receive certain kinds of information.
-Infants will increase their sucking rate when stimuli (visual or auditory) presented to them are varied but will decrease when the same stimuli are presented repeatedly.
-Newborns respond to phonetic contrasts found in human language even when these differences are not phonemic in the language spoken in the baby's home.
-Controlled experiments show that adults find it difficult to differentiate between the allophones of one phoneme, but for infants it comes naturally.
-Babbling is not linguistic chaos. The twelve most frequent consonants in the world's languages make up 95 percent of the consonants infants use in their babbling.
-The early babbles consist mainly of repeated consonant-vowel sequences, like mama, gaga, and dada.
-Gradually, the child's babbles come to include only those sounds and sound combination that occur in the target language.
-Babbling is a linguistic ability related to the kind of language input the child receives.
-During the babbling stage, the intonation contours produced by hearing infants begin to resemble the intonation contours of sentences spoken by adults.
First words
-Most children go through a stage in which their utterances consist of only one word, this stage is the hohlophrastic stage (holo=complete) (phrase=sentence).
-Here the one-word utterances seem to convey a more complex message.

The development of grammar
-Children are neurologically prepared to acquire all aspects of grammar, from phonetics to pragmatics.
Acquisition of phonology
-His first words are monosyllabic with a CV (consonant-vowel) form.
-Children first acquire the small set of sounds common to all languages, no matter what language they hear, and in later stages a child acquires the less common sounds of his own language.
-The order of acquisition of classes of sounds goes by manner of articulation: nasals first then glides, stops, liquids, fricatives, and affricatives.
-Natural classes characterized by place of articulation features also appear in children's utterances according to an ordered series: labials, velars, alveolars, palatals.
-The generalizations refer to natural classes of speech sounds.
-Controlled experiments show that children at this stage can perceive or comprehend many more phonological contrasts than they can produce.
-A child's first words show many substitutions of one feature/phoneme for another.
-Children's early pronunciations are not haphazard.
The acquisition of word meaning
-Overextensions are usually based on physical attributes such as size, shape, and texture.
-Syntactic bootstrapping is the knowledge of syntax to learn the syntactic category of the word.
The acquisition of morphology
-Children's errors in morphology reveal that the child acquires the regular rules of the grammar and overgeneralizes them.
-This overgeneralization manifests itself when children treat irregular verbs and nouns as if they were regular.

The acquisition of syntax
-In the holophrastic stage, children have knowledge of some syntactic rules.
-Children's syntactic competence is ahead of their productive abilities, which is also how their phonology develops.
-On their second birthday, children begin to put words together.
-At first each utterance appear to be strings of tow of the child's earlier holophrastic utterances, each word with its own single-pitch contour.
The acquisition of pragmatics
-Context is needed to determine the reference of pronouns.
-Children (around age 2) have difficulty with the ''shifting reference of pronouns''.
-Children also show a lack of pragmatic awareness by the way they use articles (like pronouns, the interpretation of articles depends on context).
-Children in the holophrastic stage use their one-word utterances with different illocutionary force.
The development of auxiliaries: a case study
-Children in the telegraphic stage do not typically use auxiliaries like (can-will-do) and they often omit be and have from their utterances.
-Several syntactic constructions in English depend on the presence of an auxiliary.


---------------------------



Have fun

Thank you so much 4 ur effort
i think the stupid doctor may put us down whatever we write
Good Luck

Thank you
**c* the doctor

stop cursing and be cool

يسلموو دبدوب يعطيك العافية

شكرا حبيب جزاك الله خيرا على هالمجهود الكبير

شكررررررررررررررررررررررا

thanks Romantic Teddy Bear for your efforts

settled for its highly importance