THE ART AND SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE USE

You are that

The Man Who Knew Infinity

Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.

They say marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.

Fair is foul, foul is fair.

There are only two things that I ever considered to be infinite, the Universe and Human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the first one.

Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry.

You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Most women go through life looking for love, and looking for someone to treat them like a queen. For some women finding real love seems to be something that will never happen. I believe that finding love is not as hard as people make it seem. The reason that some women can't find real love is because they look for more than just real love. A lot of women know what they need in a relationship, and that’s for a man to love that woman with all of his heart, and to treat her real good. Most women have guys in their life or guys that try to get with them that could really love them and treat them real good. Those are usually the guys that get forced into that friend zone or rejected upfront. See those guys could give them what they need, but not what they want. “Wants” can be anything from a woman wanting a man to have certain materialistic things, or she could want him to look a certain way, those are a few examples of the things that some of them want, but they vary depending on the female.

What some females don't understand is that none of the things that they want has anything with love or how that person will treat you. You could find a man that looks perfect, has a house and car, he can be a college graduate with a good job, and you could still end up being with a person that doesn't truly love you, and will treat you like shit. What I am trying to say is that the person who could treat you good and really love you could already be in your life, but you could have been blinded by the things you want in a man so you overlooked the person that you were really looking for. And by the way there are men that do the same thing; I just wanted to be clear on that.”

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

“Outside the social fact”

Q: Aren’t you well? A: Hindi Q: You want me to speak in Hindi?

A: Hindi Q: Aap ki tabiyat theek nahin hai? A:

_____ (silence) Q: Would you like some water? A:

Hindi Q (aside): Is she mad? A: Hindi Q: What the hell is Hindi!

A: “No. Hindi means no.” Q: Hindi means No?! A: Oo. Q: What happened? You hurt? A:

Hindi Q: Okay. You are not hurt. What

was that Oo? A: “Yes, Oo means yes.”

! fatafati !

! morgue

!16

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

!Swiss linguist; author of Cours de linguistique generale [Course in General Linguistics]

Class lectures published posthumously by former students in 1916

!First translated into English in 1974

!Highly influential in early to mid-twentieth century thought across disciplines

Chalti ka naam gaadi Maal ko kehtey hain khoya Rangeen ka naam narangi

Dekh Kabira roya.

Itikili mitikili phutigala kaincha Tumara amara nali paincha

Nali pein pein bajai hira Gotika pare gotika jira

!

kau kemiti benga nela nela bele godo naadi dela koiyan patara jhaadi dela jhaadi dela lo jhaadi dela

• Langue and Parole (L&P)

!

• Syntagmatic & Paradigmatic Relations (S&P)

!

• Synchronic and Diachronic (S&D)

!

• Sign – Signifier (Signifie) and Signified (Signifiant)

Langue and Parole (L&P)Hello I am Urmi. I believe you are Om. How do you do? I am Urmi. It is a pleasure

meeting you. Are you Om? Hi! I am Urmi. You are Om. Aren’t you? !

Me Urmi. You Om?

Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic

The cat scratched my dog

dog ate her homework

rat took his cheese

man bit a snake

Synchronic and Diachronic

Sign

THANK YOU BHERY MAACH

There was a fish who called herself !

THANK YOU BHERY MAACH !

Till the fishermen caught & salted her

!

And ate her with boiled starch.

LANGUAGE - Definitions•Sounds and meanings !•Sophisticated and versatile means !•Purely human and non-instinctive; voluntarily produced symbols !•Institution whereby humans communicate !•Arbitrary vocal symbols – culture !•System of sounds, words, patterns

Origin theories•Divine Source !

•Natural Sound source !

•Pooh-pooh !

•Ding-dong

Characteristics•Use of sound signals •Arbitrariness •The need for learning •Displaced reference •Creativity •Duality or double articulation •Patterning •Structure dependence •Others – Reciprocity/Interchangeability; Rapid fading; Spontaneous usage; Turn-taking, Specialisation, Feedback

Using language•Differences due to class, region, caste, ethnic group, age, sex •Diglossia •Role of language in society – sociolinguistics •Language and power – standard and dialect; gender-neutral language •Pidgins and creoles •Natural language and Artificial language

Origins of linguistic science• Study of writings preserved for their religious/

aesthetic value • Texts antiquated, interpretation necessary • Grammatical codification necessary • Study of national cultural traditions – aim to

understand and to preserve texts • Ancient treatises – 1. Tholkappiyam (11th to 6th c. BC) – diction and syntax 2. Panini 4th c. BC – Grammar of Indian languages 3. Dionysius Thrax 2nd c. BC – Greek grammar 4. Apollonius Dyskolos 2nd c. AD – Greek 5. Donatus 4th c. AD- Latin grammar

Prescriptive linguistics; Build-up to philology

•Realisation that popular language deviated from texts – further impetus to grammatical study (Descriptive) !•In Europe, Classical Latin unintelligible – theoretical grammar focus in the study of Latin !•Opening of India to Europe – beginning of the romantic movement in linguistic study; pioneers William Jones, Henry Thomas Colebrooke studied grammatical treatises in Sanskrit. What they found:

-Sanskrit-Latin -Highly exact description of (Sanskrit) pronunciation and word-formation

• Pronunciation had never been studied in Europe

• Medical investigators study physiology of language; studies by physiologist Ernst Wilhem von Brucke, philologian T. Scherer – origin of the modern discipline of phonetics

• Hindu grammarians had recorded word-formation in Sanskrit, new insight into development of linguistic forms

Modern linguistics a heritage from India

• Study of Sanskrit – new insight into relationships among languages – William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel; Franz Bopp’s investigations – contemporary languages divergent forms of earlier parent language

• More investigations, new interest in study of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and the MILs & origin of Indo-European linguistics

COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY

• Established a methodology for setting up language families

• Developed a general theory of linguistic change and relationship

• Started observing facts about language • First step towards turning study of language

into a scientific study

COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY

Approaches to study of languageTRADITIONAL APPROACH

!• Ancient grammarians primarily interested in written

forms – ‘pure’, ‘correct’, ‘corrupt’, ‘decayed’ • Latin grammarians – Greek model, Indian gramm –

Sanskrit model to describe all languages • Meaning taken into account while explaining

grammar ! syntax followed logically from meaning • Language – mere tool for analysing reality; linguistics

subordinate to logic and philosophy • Prescriptive linguistics – ‘ought to’ rather than ‘what

is’

STRUCTURAL APPROACH (Period of colonisation; discovery of Sanskrit; several oral languages, endangered languages also discovered) !• Europe – Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), Benjamin

Lee Whorf, Louis Hjemslev, Nikolas Trubetzkoy, Roman Jaksobson

• America – Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1947), Franz Boas, Edward Sapir

• Languages described in their own terms; treated with respect and recognised for their self-sufficiency and complexity; ideas of linguistic superiority rejected

• Shift of focus from written to oral languages; study of variations in language – dialect, register

• Meaning no more objectively verifiable; object of introspection and subjective analysis

DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR / LINGUISTICS

Examples: !•Joseph Greenberg noticed regular connections between different parts of grammar in a no. of languages •Charles Hockett devised a set of criteria to differentiate between human language and animal communication systems •Zellig Harris proposed a general method of analysing languages – Methods in Structural Linguistics •Saussure proposed four binary and complementary concepts – Course in General Linguistics – ‘language is a system of systems’. •Franz Boas and Edward Sapir – borrowed field methods from anthropological researches and used them for recording and analysing languages •Bloomfield – Synthesised the theory and practice of linguistic analysis – Language

First International Congress of Linguists 1928 COGNITIVE APPROACH

Noam Chomsky – Syntactic Structures, 1957 ‘Linguistic theory must be able to capture the psychological aspect of knowledge of language’: 1) What is in the mind / brain of the speaker? 2) How did this knowledge arise in the mind? 3) How is this knowledge put to use in speech? 4) Aim – to construct a theory to explain and predict

facts regarding language !!!

Generative grammar - generates all correct sentences Transformative – one of the means of achieving it

Generative grammar / TG Linguistics

SOUNDS OF ENGLISH

SpeechMechanism

Speech MechanismThe three sound systems

Consonants and vowels Description and classification

Place of articulation

!

Manner of articulation

!

Voiced or voiceless

!

Oral or nasal

ENGLISH PHONETICS PHONOLOGY

Consonant sounds

All sounds are pulmonic egressive sounds

Place of Articulation

Labial: Consonants whose main restriction is formed by the two lips coming together have a bilabial place of articulation. In English these include [p] as in possum, [b] as in bear, and [m] as in marmot.

The English labiodental consonants [v] and [f] are made by pressing the bottom lip against the upper row of teeth and letting the air flow through the space in the upper teeth

Place of Articulation

Dental: Sounds that are made by placing the tongue against the teeth are dentals. The main dentals in English are the [th] of thing or the [dh] of though, which are made by placing the tongue behind the teeth with the tip slightly between the teeth.

Alveolar: The alveolar ridge is the portion of the roof of the mouth just behind ALVEOLAR the upper teeth. Most speakers of American English make the phones [s], [z], [t], and [d] by placing the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge.

Place of Articulation (2/3)!

! Palatal: The roof of the mouth (the palate) rises sharply from the back of the alveolar ridge. The palato-alveolar sounds [sh] (shrimp), [ch] (china), [zh] (Asian), and [jh] (jar) are made with the blade of the tongue against this rising back of the alveolar ridge. The palatal sound [y] of yak is made by placing the front of the tongue up close to the palate.

Place of Articulation (3/3)! Velar: The velum or soft palate is a movable

muscular flap at the very back of the roof of the mouth. The sounds [k] (cuckoo), [g] (goose), and [N] (kingfisher) are made by pressing the back of the tongue up against the velum. !

! Glottal: The glottal stop [q] (IPA [P]) is made by closing the glottis (by bringing the vocal folds together).

Manner of Articulation (1/5)! All consonants are produced by restriction of

airflow ! Manner of Articulation: How the restriction is

produced: complete or partial stoppage

! A stop is a consonant in which airflow is completely blocked for a short time.

! This blockage is followed by an explosive sound as the air is released. The period of blockage is called the closure and the explosion is called the release.

! English has voiced stops like [b], [d], and [g] as well as unvoiced stops like [p], [t], and [k].

! Stops are also called plosives

Manner of Articulation (2/5)!Nasal sounds [n], [m], and [ng] are made by lowering the velum and allowing air to pass into the nasal cavity. !Fricatives, airflow is constricted but not cut off completely. The turbulent airflow that results from the constriction produces a characteristic “hissing” sound.

The English labiodental fricatives [f] and [v] are produced by pressing the lower lip against the upper teeth, allowing a restricted airflow between the upper teeth. The dental fricatives [th] and [dh] allow air to flow around the tongue between the teeth.

The alveolar fricatives [s] and [z] are produced with the tongue against the alveolar ridge, forcing air over the edge of the teeth.

In the palato-alveolar fricatives [sh] and [zh] the tongue is at the back of the alveolar ridge forcing air through a groove formed in the tongue.

Manner of Articulation (3/5)!! Fricatives, airflow is constricted but not cut off

completely. The turbulent airflow that results from the constriction produces a characteristic “hissing” sound.

The higher-pitched fricatives (in English [s], [z], [sh] and [zh]) are called sibilants

Stops that are followed immediately by fricatives are called affricates; these include English [ch] (chicken) and [jh] (giraffe).

Manner of Articulation (4/5)! In approximants, the two articulators are close

together but not close enough to cause turbulent airflow. In English [y] (yellow), the tongue moves close to the roof of the mouth but not close enough to cause the turbulence that would characterize a fricative. !

! In English [w] (wood), the back of the tongue comes close to the velum. !

! American [r] can be formed in at least two ways; with just the tip of the tongue extended and close to the palate or with the whole tongue bunched up near the palate.

Manner of Articulation (5/5)! [l] is formed with the tip of the tongue up against the

alveolar ridge or the teeth, with one or both sides of the tongue lowered to allow air to flow over it. [l] is called a lateral sound because of the drop in the sides of the tongue. !

! A tap or flap [dx] (or IPA [R]) is a quick motion of the tongue against the alveolar ridge. The consonant in the middle of the word lotus ([l ow dx ax s]) is a tap in most dialects of American English; speakers of many UK dialects would use a [t] instead of a tap in this word.

Articulation of consonants: Larynx action/glottis state

! Vocal cords are pulled apart. The air passes freely through the glottis. This is called the voicelessness state and sounds produced with this configuration of the vocal cords are called voiceless: p t k f θ s ʃ tʃ

! Vocal cords are pulled close together. The air passing through the glottis causes the vocal cords to vibrate. This is called the voicing state and sounds produced with this configuration of the vocal cords are called voiced: b d g v ð z ʒ dʒ

! Vocal cords are apart at the back and pulled together at the front. This is called the whisper state.

! Vocal cords assume the voicing state but are relaxed. This is called the murmur state.

Four different states of the glottis

!60

Voicing: A consonant may be

! Voiced (lenis) ! Voiceless (fortis)