Transcription of Lecture Notes: Linguistics
1 Lecture Notes: LinguisticsEdward Stabler, Winter 2014 notes:(page numbers will change during the quarter)1 The nature of human languages12 Morphology113 Syntactic constituents and categories234 The anatomy of a phrase335 Heads and non-recursive combinations416 Sentences and first glimpse of movement537 Clauses, tense, and questions638 Review: The perspective so far759 Semantics: What it all means8510 Semantic perspectives on determiners etc9311 Names, pronouns and binding9912 Phonetics10313 Phonology introduced11514 Phonemes and rules of variation12515 Stress and intonation13916 Universals, and review145iStabler - Linguistics 20, Winter 2014iiLinguistics 20 Introduction to LinguisticsLecture MW2-4 in Bunche 2209 AProf.
2 Ed StablerOffice Hours: M4-5, by appt, or stop byOffice: Campbell are human languages, such that they can be acquired and used as theyare? This class surveys some of the most important and recentapproaches to this question,breaking the problem up along traditional lines. In spoken languages, what are the basicspeech sounds? How are these sounds articulated and combined? What are the basic units ofmeaning? How are the basic units of meaning combined into complex phrases? How are thesecomplexes interpreted? These questions are surprisingly hard! This introductory survey canonly briefly touch on each : Linguistics : An introduction to linguistic Fromkin (ed.), which is availablenew and usedhere,here,here,here here, and homework will be posted and grades:There will be 4 homework assignments, assigned on Wednesdaysand due the following Monday in Lecture , at the beginning of class.
3 The homework will begraded by the TAs and discussed in the discussion sections. There will be 3 mid-term quizzesduring the quarter, and an in-class final exam. The exams willbe analytic problems verysimilar to those given in the final exam will have 4 parts, 1 part corresponding to each of the 3 earlier quizzes, and 1part for the new material. So for each of the first 3 parts of theclass, we will have 2 grades:the original quiz and the grade on corresponding section of the final. Your grade will be thehigher of those 2. The part of the final on new material will be worth 16%. The idea is tomake the quizzes much less stressful (and a better indication of what you have learned) thanjust 1 or 2 huge exams.
4 You get a second shot at first 3 parts of the and final exam dates (all held in class) are posted on the website, ,where Lecture notes, and reading assignments will also be posted each - Linguistics 20, Winter 2014ivLecture 1 The nature of human languagesThese Lecture notes will contain the required reading for the class, and for supplementaryreading the text edited byFromkin(2000), Linguistics : An Introduction to linguistic Theory,is recommended (That text was written specifically for this class, but it has 747 pages!) Inthis class, I will be clear about which things you are expected to understand completely basically, it will be everything in these notes. This Lecture is based on Chapter 1 of Fromkin,but if you compare you will see that we select just some parts and extend other.
5 , Zipf s law .. and rules ..8 Human language is the most familiar of subjects, but most people do not devote muchtime to thinking about it. The basic fact we start with is this: I can make some gestures thatyou can perceive (the marks on this page, or the sounds at the front of the classroom), andalmost instantaneously you come to have an idea about what I meant. Not only that, youridea about what I meant is usually similar to the idea of the student sitting next to you. Ourbasic question is:How is that possible??And:How can a child learn to do this?The account of how sounds relate to meaning separate parts (which you may have seenalready in the syllabus), reasons that will not be perfectlyclear until the end of the class:1.
6 Phonetics - in spoken language, what are the basic speech sounds?2. phonology - how are the speech sounds represented and combined?3. morphology - what are words? are they the basic units of phrases and of meaning?4. syntax - how are phrases built from those basic units?5. semantics - how is the meaning linguistic units and complexes determined?Agrammaris a speaker s knowledge of all of these 5 kinds of propertiesof language. Thegrammar we are talking about here isnotrules about how one shouldspeak (that s sometimescalled prescriptive grammar ). Rather, the grammar we areinterested in here is what thespeaker knows that makes it possible to speak at all, to speakso as to be understood, and tounderstand what is said by others.
7 The ideas are relatively new: that an appropriate grammarwill be a component of psychological and neurophysiological accounts of linguistic abilities,and that it should be divided into something like the 5 components above. But our descriptivegoals are similar to ancient (600-500 BCE) wrote a grammarof 3,959 rules for Sanskrit, and is said tohave been killed by a lion. He is the onlylinguist I know of who has been killed bya lion. And he is the only linguist I knowof who has been put on a postage the first two components of grammar listed above, note the indication that wewill focus on spoken languages, and particularly on American English since that is the languagewe all share in this class.
8 But of course not all human languages are spoken. There are manysign languages. American Sign Language (ASL) is the most common in the US, but now, atthe beginning of 2014, the online Ethnologue1lists 137 sign languages. The phonetics andphonology of sign languages involves manual and facial gestures rather than oral, vocalic speech in these languages is gestured. As we will see, the patterns of morphology, syntax,1 - Linguistics 20, Winter 2014and semantics in human languages are remarkably independent of the physical properties ofspeech, in all human languages, and so it is no surprise that the morphology, syntax, andsemantics of sign languages exhibit the same kinds of structure found in spoken each of the 5 pieces of grammar mentioned above, there is anemphasis on the basic units(the basic sounds, basic units of phrases, basic units of meaning), and how they are like to begin thinking about the project of Linguistics by reflecting on why the problemsshould be tackled in this way, starting with basic units.
9 There is an argument for thatstrategy, which I ll describe Productivity, and Zipf s lawProductivity:Every human language has an unlimited number of our commonsense notion of sentence (which will be refined with various technical con-cepts later), we can extend any sentence you choose to a new, longer one. In fact, the numberof sentences is unlimited even if we restrict our attention to sensible sentences, sentences thatany competent speaker of the language could understand (barring memory lapses, untimelydeaths, etc.).This argument is right, but there is a stronger point that we can make. Even if we restrictour attention to sentences of reasonable length, say to sentences with less than 50 words orso, there are a huge number of sentences.
10 Fromkin (2000, )says that the average personknows from 45,000 to 60,000 words. (I don t think this figure is to be trusted! For one thing,it depends on what a word is, and on what counts as knowing one both tricky questions.)But suppose that you know 50,000 words. Then the number of different sequences of thosewords is very large. Of course, many of those word sequences are not sentences, but quite afew of them are, so most sentences are going to be very rare. Empirical sampling confirmsthat this is true. What is more surprising is that even most words are very see this, let s take a bunch of newspaper articles (from the Penn Treebank ) about10 megabytes of text from the Wall Street Journal about 1 million words.
