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Introduction to Linguistics 2

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Introduction to Linguistics Teacher: Simon Smith ( 史尚明 ) This semester’s course: the next steps of

linguistic analysis– the study of meaning– language change– language in society– language acquisition and learning– computers and linguistics 

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About me…

I first came to Taiwan in 1991 BA in Linguistics and Chinese, Leeds MSc in Machine Translation, Manchester PhD in Statistical Language Modeling,

Birmingham Post-doctoral year at Academia Sinica This is my fourth year at Ming Chuan

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Why study Linguistics? Linguistics: related to your English studies But also a science

– The scientific study of language You will get a good grasp of linguistic principles You will understand more about how languages (including

English and Chinese) work. Linguistics asks such questions as

– Why do languages change over time?– Why is it easy for kids to learn their first language, but difficult

for adults?

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Why take this course? It’s taught (mostly) in English

– Your English reading, writing, listening and speaking will all improve

It’s taught in a Western way: you will– think critically– discuss issues with classmates and teacher– question what classmates, teacher and even famous linguists say

You will learn to– describe your own ideas, and others’ ideas, in a logical way, by

giving presentations to the class– write a medium-length essay, in the Western tradition

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Course grades: written work In-class or homework

exercises every two weeks or so

There will be one or two short quizzes

You will write one medium length essay (about 2000 words)– details later

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Course grades: discussion & presentation

Discussion– You will discuss

Linguistics and Language in small groups

Presentation– You will give a

presentation in Chinese, with a classmate, on a linguistic topic

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Class rules Attendance is mandatory

– Assistant class leader please take attendance at break time– More than 4 missed classes (whether for sickness, sports, laziness,

病假 , 公假 , or any reason) – 0%! If you arrive late, you must apologize and explain the

reason Please don’t eat hot food Please switch off your phone Please don’t chatter while I’m speaking Work only on class material during class time

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Class website

http://mcu.edu.tw/~ssmith Here you will find

– These PowerPoint slides– Syllabus, recommended reading and websites– Your grades

» Check grades on-line after quizzes and exercises are returned to you

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Textbook

Yule, The Study of Language (Cambridge, 2006)

You must buy a copy if you haven’t already You must bring the book every week

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Last semester’s syllabusWeeks 1 - 2 Introduction, What is language?

Weeks 3 - 5 The structure of words: Morphology

Weeks 6 - 9 The sounds of language: Phonetics & Phonology

Week 10 Mid-term exam

Weeks 11-13 The structure of sentences: Syntax

Weeks 14-16 The study of meaning: Semantics

Week 17 Beyond the sentence: Pragmatics

Week 18 Final exam

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This semester: We finish the study of the different linguistic levels

We will look at some other topics– Psycholinguistics– Sociolinguistics– Computational linguistics– Corpus linguistics

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我覺得這個教室太熱 ! - syntax

We can also say– 這個教室 , 我覺得太熱 !

I don’t think we can really say– ? 我把這個教室覺得太熱 , because it sounds very strange

And we certainly can’t say something like– * 我覺得太熱這個教室 , although we might understand it if

someone said it But if someone said

– * 教室這個 , 太熱覺得我 , we would probably have no idea what they were talking about

This is because of syntactic rules governing Mandarin.

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我覺得這個教室好冰喔 ! You can choose different words, and get more or

less the same meaning– Like 好熱 , or 非常熱 , or 熱得不得了

But some lexical choices (=possible words) are not available:

– 我覺得這 (* 位 ) 教室太熱– 我覺得這個教室太 (* 燙 )– This is because the classifier 位 selects a human noun– And because 燙 modifies substances like liquids, not spaces like

rooms

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In pragmatics 我覺得這個教室好冰喔 ! Is it only a comment on the temperature? Or does it really mean something like

– Please can you turn the air-conditioning on? In English, I’m not sure can mean No

– And 我可能不去 generally means “I’m not going” Pragmatics tells us to look beyond the sentence

to find the real meaning

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Historical linguistics How languages are related

– Language families» Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan…

– Areal linguistics» Greek, Bulgarian

– Mostly borrowed words; also shared grammatical features» Chinese, Korean, Japanese

How language changes over time– sounds: poor vs paw, suit. – vocab: 咖啡 , 颱風 . Calque: 摩天大樓 , skyscraper, gratte-ciel– grammar: Did you eat yet? Adversative passive 被

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Sociolinguistics Diglossia: “high” and “low” prestige languages

– The role of Mandarin and Taiwanese in a bilingual society

– The changing role of English in Taiwan society: borrowing, or showing off?

– case and size: code-switching, or lexicalized Chinese words?

Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching

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Applications for linguistics Speech disorders Forensic linguistics

– Accent detection– Style verification (eg police style)

Language teaching Computational applications

– Machine translation– Speech recognition and synthesis– Language identification

Starting semantics

Read the end of chapter 9, beginning of chapter 10

Look at these

放東西 放冰箱跳樓 跳河

Write three more pairs like these Describe the role of the verb in each case

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