The History of Writing

• Pictograms and Ideograms

• Petroglyphs: rock drawings found in caves like Altamira 
• Pictograms: image of an object
• Ideograms: pictogram that represents an idea

• Cuneiform Writing

• Old known form of writing, developed by the Sumerians
• Wedge-shaped form of symbols

Logograms: symbols that represent words (used in word-writing systems like Chinese)
Emoticons: strings of text characters that represent emotions; used in email and electronic communication

The Rebus Principle

• Phonographic symbol: stands for a sound that represents a word.
• not efficient for all words, but fun and popular for kids (in the example below, take away the letter sound after the dash)

From Hieroglyphics to the Alphabet

• Egyptians used pictographic system which the Greeks called Hieroglyphics
• Pictograms  came to represent both the concept and the word for the concept
• Through the Rebus Principle, Hieroglyphics became a syllabic writing system
• Phoenicians developed the West Semitic Syllabary (most were symbols for consonants)
• Greeks tried to borrow the Phoenician writing system – but Greek has a complex syllable structure; Greeks took the extra consonants and made them symbolize the Greek vowels. the result was Alphabetic writing (from the names of the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta
• Etruscans knew the Greek system (probably because of Greek colonists in Italy) and the Romans learned it from them. (Etruscans lived in Etruria (Tuscany and Umbria) between about the 8th century BC and the 1st century AD

Modern Writing Systems

Word Writing

• logographic: a written character represents both the meaning and pronunciation of each word or morpheme
• Used in China and Japan
• Why won’t it work with English or other Indo-European languages?
• Chinese writing
• Advantages of a word writing system for China: many of the spoken dialects are mutually unintelligible; writing allows for communication by literate Chinese worldwide
• Simplified system: based on Traditional Chinese characters - developed in the P.R.C. to improve literacy rates in China
• Romanized writing: Pinyin allows people who don’t know the characters to read and write Chinese words. Many systems have been developed to do this; Pinyin is the official P.R.C. version
• Calligraphy: art form developed around Chinese and other Asian word writing systems

Syllabic Writing

• Used in language with primarily CV syllable structure
• Inefficient to apply to  language like English, which  has many consonant clusters in syllable structure

Japanese

• Two syllabaries, or kana:
• Hiragana:  used for native Japanese words (in simplified writing for learners and children)
• Katakana: used for loan words, special effects (onomatopoeia, sounds), and botanical names
• Word writing system: Kanji - not completely suitable because Japanese is an inflected language; verbs can have 30 or more different forms. So Kanji is combined with Hiragana to show inflection.  Kanji can be used to disambiguate homographs
• Romanization system: three systems for ローマ字. (Romaji) These are used for learners and non-Japanese-readers of Japanese words.

Cherokee and other Syllabic Scripts

• Cherokee was not written until this script was developed in 1819 by George Guess, a.k.a. Chief Sequoyah
• 18 syllabaries are listed on Omniglot as used for writing several Native American, Celtic, and African languages
• Surprisingly, more than one of the creators of syllabaries was inspired by a dream: Mende, Vai, Ndjuká

Consonantal Alphabetic Writing

• Semitic Languages like Hebrew and Arabic are written with only consonants
• Diacritic marks can express vowels
• Must know the spoken language to read these alphabets

Alphabetic Writing

• Sound writing  not totally so it’s more of a phonemic system
• True phonetic system: IPA
• Icelandic: “The First Grammarian”
• Hangul (Korean) invented by King Seijong
• Special characteristics of alphabetic languages
• Diacritic Marks: accommodate individual characteristics of particular languages, such as tones,  palatalization
• Digraphs: two letters written together
• Cyrillic Alphabet
• Arabic
• Farsi  (Persian)
  
• Western Farsi, or Persian is  spoken by about 22 million people in central and south central Iran. There  are a further 2 million speakers in many other countries including Australia,  Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, India,  Iraq, Israel, Netherlands, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden and Tajikistan.
• Eastern Farsi or Dari is  spoken by about 7 million people in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• Tajiki is spoken by in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan,  Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan by about 4.4 million  people.
• Urdu an Indo-Aryan language with about 104 million speakers; national language of Pakistan

• Fun with created scripts
• And we can’t forget about Klingon (“Language is the Best Weapon”)

Reading, Writing, and Speech

• The purposes of punctuation
• restrict clauses
• reflect intonation or pauses
• provide syntactic information
• show stress
• disambiguate
• Which is more conservative – written or oral language? Why?
• Reading
• Spelling
• George Bernard Shaw and spelling reform 
• The Shavian Alphabet, developed by Kingsley Read
• Alternative Spelling and the International Phonetic Alphabet  (Or….what you would look like after a lifetime of dealing with English spelling reform)
• Another superstar of spelling reform, Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain, wrote: The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet. It doesn’t know how to spell, and can’t be taught. In this it is like all other alphabets except one–the phonographic. This is the only competent alphabet in the world. It can spell and correctly pronounce any word in our language.
  
  That admirable alphabet, that brilliant alphabet, that inspired alphabet, can be learned in an hour or two. In a week the student can learn to write it with some little facility, and to read it with considerable ease. I know, for I saw it tried in a public school in Nevada forty-five years ago, and was so impressed by the incident that it has remained in my memory ever since.
• Unigraf:
• Unigraf, a name suggesting one and only one grapheme per sound, began as an attempt to find the most intuitive locations on the standard keyboard for 40 plus unique sound signs.  Such a phonascii or asciibet is needed to access the 40+ symbols on a phonetic font.  Others have made key assignments without paying too much attention to the consequences of their choices.  The first 25 phonogram assignments are easy and most developers of phonetic fonts have been in agreement on these. The aeiou keys are usually assigned to the short (checked) vowels and the shifted AEIOU keys are assigned to the most familiar long (free) vowels.  English has 12 pure vowels so positions for an additional two must be found.  This is where the disagreements begin.
• Homographs: words with the samespelling but different pronunciation
• Blame the printing press! (for weird English spellings being spread abroad)
• Spelling reform: with corrections like these…who needs the Greek lesson?
• Why doesn’t spelling reform work?
• What is an argument against phonetic spelling in English?

• Morphophonemic orthography; why English spelling reflects morphemic knowledge; see the plural -s, for example.

Spelling Pronunciations

This explains the ‘herb’ pronunciation differences between American and British English; Which one is the more conservative?
And how do you pronounce Worcester, Mass? Or Berkeley?

• Subfields of Semantics
• lexical semantics: concerned with the meanings of words
• phrasal or sentential semantics: concerned with larger syntactic units
• There are more types which the text doesn’t cover

Pragmatics: The interpretation of linguistic meaning in context. (according to the text; my own definition is that it is the study of how we do things with language. The Wiki definitions are:

The study of language as it is used in a social context, including its effect on the interlocutors.

The branch of semiotics that deals with the relationship between signs, especially words and other elements of language, and their users.

Semantic Properties: pieces of information associated with a word

• semantic properties are part of the meaning of all nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and some function words
• represented through a notation with positive or negative semantic features (mare = +female, -human, -young, +equine)
• language teaching example: count/noncount nouns (177) can only occur with a particular quantifier: count nouns with many, noncount (mass) nouns with much.
• nouns in some languages are associated with specific classifiers

  -nyms
  (a bound morpheme, by the way!)

• Homonyms: words that are pronounced the same, may or may not be spelled the same and have different meanings. May lead to ambiguity
• A word with multiple meanings that are related historically is polysemous
• heteronyms: words are spelled the same but pronounced differently
• homographs: words that are spelled the same but have different meanings (dove- the bird & dove – past of dive)
• synonyms;  words that have the same or nearly the same meaning
• paraphrases: sentences which use synonyms in identical constructions
• creates lexical paraphrase

• antonyms: words that are opposite
• share all but one semantic property
• are gradable:  meaning is related to the object they modify
• marked/unmarked members of pairs of gradable antonyms: mountain & high, not low
• relational opposites: employer/employee
• formed with prefixes

• hyponyms: a word that represents the relationship between general terms and specific instances of a class; color has the hyponym red
• metonym: substitutes for the object that is meant, the name of an attribute or concept associated with that object; i.e., Hollywood for the film industry, Washington for the US government
• retronyns:  redundant words at an earlier time; whole milk, conventional warfare, acoustic guitar.

(see fun-with -words)

See Student exercises for more fun

Proper names

Shortcuts for a specific object or entity

•  have characteristic of being definite (this means in English they don’t need a determiner such as the to indicate definite – exceot in particular instances (there are always these pesky exceptions!)
• can’t be pluralized

Phrase and Sentence Meaning

Principle of Compositionality: meaning of a phrase is composed of meaning of words and how they are combined structurally
Visiting relatives can be boring

Phrasal Meaning

Noun-Centered Meaning

• reference: an object is pointed to through a noun phrase
• referent: the object pointed to through a noun phrase
• coreferential: phrases that point to the same object – may not mean the sentences have the same meaning
• sense: additional meaning

Verb-Centered Meaning

• agent, theme, and goal: thematic roles of the verb
• Useful chart ( 192-193)
• represented by case in some languages

Sentential Meaning

• truth conditions: the conditions under which the sentence is true
• paraphrases: sentences which have the same truth conditions
• entailment: truth of one sentence entails (implies) the truth od another
• contradiction: ne gative entailment
• eventives/statives:  syntactic consequences result from this characteristic of sentences

Pronouns and Coreferentiality

• reflexive pronouns: syntax reflects identical referents in antecedents

Meanings that are Veiled or Nonexistent

• anomaly: syntactically correct expressions which are not interpretable semantically
• metaphor:  nonliteral or indirect meaning (note George Lakoff’s book, and article on Metaphors of Terror
• idioms: meaning is not related to meanings of parts of the phrase (a language teacher’s dream (if what you want is job security) or nightmare (if you are asked to explain them a lot))
  See exercise on compositional meaning. (supplemental worksheets)

Pragmatics

Interpretation of linguistic meaning in context.

• linguistic context
• situational context, or knowledge of the world

Discourse Analysis

• how speakers combine sentences into broader speech units
• examines style, appropriateness, cohesiveness, etc.

Situational Context

• Grice’s cooperative principle
• Conversational maxims

Speech Acts

• What we get done with language
• Performatives
• illocutionary force
• presuppositions
• implication
• Deixis

The Linguistics War

Interview with George Lakoff: 
George Lakoff on the split with Chomsky: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/9956
In addition, the conceptual framework of generative semantics derives much from outside of transformational grammar, for instance, model-theoretical semantics in the tradition of Tarksi and Carnap, and more recently Kripke, Montague, Scott and others, the concern for language use that one finds in the writings of Wittgenstein, Austin, Grice, and Searle, Zadeh’s work on inexact concepts, recent sociolinguistics as represented in the work of Labov, Hymes, Gumperz, Bickerton, Bailey, and others, and trends in the sociology small-group interactions as represented in the works of Goffman, Garfinkle, Sachs, and Schegloff. What we are trying to do is develop a linguistic theory that is rooted in the study of human thought and culture—the very antithesis of transformational grammar as narrowly construed by Chomsky.

• Syntactic categories
• phrasal categories (NP & VP)
• lexical categories (Noun & Verb)
• functional categories (Det, Aux & Comp)
• Head & Complements – internal structure of each syntactic
  category
• Order of elements within the phrase is determined by the phrase structure rules for each language

Deep structure: basic phrase structure trees of a language

Some categories appear on both the right and the left side of the rule – this
accounts for infinite number of possible sentences

 Lexicon

• knowledge speakers have about the vocabulary of their language
• syntactic category of words & elements that may occur together
• selectional restrictions

Selection:

• transitive verb selects for a NP direct object complement

Phrase structure Rules:

• Speaker’s set of rules that generate language
• Example: An NP can contain a determiner followed by a noun.

Syntax: a speaker’s knowdge of sentences and their structures

• Sequences of words that conform to the rules of syntax are well-formed or grammatical.
• Those that violate the rules are ill-formed or ungrammatical.

Ambiguity: Multiple meanings of a string (phrase)

• Ambiguity can be resolved through knowledge of the heirarchical structure of the string
• Structural ambiguity: results from
  different possible structures (represented by different phrase structure
  trees)

Other kinds of abiguity – important to diplomatic work

Alternative grammars:

Dependency Grammar

Computer models of grammars:

Connexor Natural Language Analyzer

May 3: Lyndsay & Laura: Language and the Brain4

May 8: Jennifer, Ashley, Rakhee: Phonetics (ppt)
You Tube video of the mouth tool for teaching pronunciation

May 15: Alicia, Mirna, Michelle D.

May 17: Angela, Katie, Michelle .

May 22: Carmen & Amy

May 29: Tina & Jerry

May 31: Lil & Michelle R.

Applications Lessons:

May 22: Jennifer, Laura, Tina

May 24: Michelle D, Ashley, Jerry, Rakhee

May 29: Lyndsay, Lil, Carmen

May 31: Amy, Mirna, Alicia

June 5: Angela, Katie

June 7: Michelle R, Michele W.

phones: phonetic segments that occur in a language (these may not make a difference in meaning, however)
phoneme: Significant sound contrast in a language that serves to distinguish meaning, as in minimal pairs.
phonemics: The study of the sound contrasts (phonemes) of a particular language.
phonetics: The study of speech sounds in general; what people actually say in various languages.
phonology 
1. The study of sounds used in speech.
2. The mental representation of the sounds and sound patterns in a speaker’s mental grammar, or the linguistic knowledge about sound a speaker has

Telling a phone from a phoneme: [phone]  /phoneme/

Similar phones that occur in complementary distribution are allophones
Example: pill has [p^h] while spill has [p] and both are allophones of the phoneme /p/

morpheme: (leftover from Chapter 3) the minimal unit of linguistic meaning or grammatical function; an elemental grammatical unit

Phonetic Features

Used to write phonological rules
describe distinctive features of a sound

Minimal Pairs

These show that a single phonological feature can effect meaning
Exercise1 (299) Kinds of Phonological Rules>

• assimilation (273)
• dissimilation (276)
• adding nondistinctive features (277) (ex, aspiration)
• epenthesis (278)
• deletion (278 – 280)
• metathesis (281) examples of funny metathesis

Morphophonemic rules: see plural morpheme [z], [s] or [schwa]

Rule-writing activity:

Exercise 6 (301)

Exercise 7 (302)

Stress activity:

Exercise 9 (303)

Background on Paku

Articulatory Phonetics

Let’s Learn IPA!

• Cool chart with spoken examples

• IPA “Sammy” See the places of articulation, manner, etc LIVE!

How we produce sound: mostly through a pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism

Other ways to produce sound:

Ingressive

• clicks
• Xhosa examples
• X-Ray of a click
• Nama folk tale (Explanation of symbols for different clicks)
• ku!khaasi lullaby (an extinct Khosian language)
• implosives

Egressive

• Tutorial on plosives – good way to test your knowledge

Dialect Differences BBC English vowels

Compare to American English Vowels

Try transcription with the IPA
Major Classes Here’s a really nice chart showing the “Natural Classes”

Why bother to learn the feature classes?
Categorization is useful. All OBSTRUENTS are [+cons], [-son].

Obstruents can be further divided into [+cont] for fricatives, and [-cont] for stops and affricates.

Fricatives are further divided into [+strident] and [-strident].

Stops and affricates are further distinguished by the feature [del. rel.] which has a positive value only for affricates.

SONORANTS (liquids and nasals) are [+cons],[+son].

In addition sonorants are [+nasal] for nasals or [-nasal] for liquids.

Lateral liquids are further distinguished as [+lat], the other liquids being [-lat].

VOWELS, GLIDES, and APPROXIMANTS are [-cons], [+son].
Suprasegmental Features
These are features length of sound, pitch, or volume
supra – above
Tone and Intonation Tonal languages differentiate by tone changes.

• Chinese has four basic tones: they are written this way
• And pronouced this way

Diacritics: Indicate phonetic differences

Lexicon: mental database of roots, inflectional and derivational morphemes

What does our morphological knowledge consist of?

Types of morphemes:

Free morphemes: can stand alone as a word

Bound morphemes: always appear as part of a word

Better example of English infix: Minne-frigging-sota (A. Spokane)

Roots & Stems

Root: a lexical content morpheme that cannot be analyzed into smaller parts

• May or may not stand alone as a word (see examples ofsuch unpaired words)
• Bound forms with no meaning in isolation: huckle-, boysen-, luke-
• Roots which have lost their meaning: -ceive, -mit

Monomorphemic words: words which have only one morpheme

Derivational morphemes: create a new word with a different meaning, such as un- when added to a noun, thus creating the opposite meaning

Derived word: a word that has had a derivational morpheme added to it

Derivation is governed by rules reflecting a hierarchical structure

Tree diagrams for representing a word

Inflectional morphemes: create words with a different grammatical meaning, such as ‘make’ becoming makes’ when the third person singular suffix is added.

Lexical gaps: Not all possible words are formed by a language

*I admire your coolth.

Heard of cranberry morphemes?

Sign Language Morphology

Sign languages have root morphemes, affixes, free and bound morphemes, and morphological rules.

Derivation is accomplished through modification of the hand movement and the space in which the signs are articulated. (Sign uses a rectangular space in front of the body for signing)

Word Coinage

• new words can enter a language through a derivational process
• some are created
• two words can be combined into a compound

Compound words

Right-most word is the head (determines the meaning and grammatical category)

Acronyms

Words derived from initials of several words.

Pronunciation can be based on the letters, sounded out as a word or just sounding out each letter.

Back-Formations

Created because of incorrect morphological analysis: pease –> pea

Abbreviations

Words abbreviated then the abbreviation becomes lexicalized: facsimile –> Fax;

pianoforte -> piano

Dis (from disrespect) = clipping

Words from Names

Words that came from a person’s name; sandwich, jumbo, paparazzi

Blends

Two words are combined and parts deleted; smog, motel, infomercial

Grammatical Morphemes

Function words, such as it or to only have a grammatical meaning

• function words are free morphemes

Inflectional Morphemes

• bound morphemes
• do not change meaning
• follow derivational morphemes in most cases (except compounds)

Exceptions and Suppletions

Suppletive forms are irregular and are treated differently by the grammar; their inflections may even be “invisible.”

New words, however, come into the language usually with regular inflections, such as geek(s), fax(es). But sometimes borrowed words come in to the language with the plural form of their native grammar; datum/data

So, these words have to be memorized – regular rules don not apply. See lists of irregular plurals in English

Morphology and Syntax

Some languages allow affixes to grammatical relationships, while others rely on word order.

There is often more than one way to express grammatical relations

Fun with Morphological Analysis

The Martian linguist – where does this idea come from? It’s from Chomsky; he uses it this way:

Take language, one of the few distinctive human capacities about which much is known. We have very strong reasons to believe that all possible human languages are very similar; a Martian scientist observing humans might conclude that there is just a single language, with minor variants.(from a 1995 interview with Kevin Doyle)

To this day his only message is: see, think, judge and decide for yourself. This is Chomsky’s own particular talent: he is very good at stepping back and thinking about what it is he’s actually seeing.That’s why he asks questions other people don’t ask. It’s no accident that Martians regularly crop up in everything he writes, whether the topic is language or power. What would Martians see if they could observe us from afar? (from a 2003 interview with Liesbeth Koenen)

More Paku vocabulary can be found here- scroll down to the bottom of page

Neurolinguistics: the study of the biological and neural foundations of language

Cortex: surface of the brain “gray matter“

white matter: connecting fibers beneath the cortex

cerebral hemispheres:
left/right halves of the brain


corpus callosum: network of 2 million
fibers connecting the hemispheres

contralateral brain function: left side
of brain controls functioning of right side of body and right hemisphere of brain controls left side of body.

Modularity of the Brain

First indications came from phrenology – practice of determining personality traits and abilities based on reading the bumps on the skull. Proposed by Franz Joseph Gall in early 1800s. Phrenology has been discarded but Gall’s concept of modularity has been upheld.

Paul Broca – 1864: related language to the left side of the brain, based on autopsies of people who had language deficits and damage to the left frontal lobes of brian. This area came to be called Broca’s area

Broca’s Aphasia:language disorder that results from injury to Broca’s area

Aphasia: any language disorder that results from brain damage caused by disease or trauma

Carl Wernicke
- 1874 – identified aphasia in patients with damage to the back left portion of brain. (Wernicke’s area)

Wernicke’s aphasia: patients who spoke fluently but had numerous lexical errors; using jargon and nonsense words. Had difficulty in comprehending speech.

Does everyone have language functions in the left side of their brains? How about left-handed people? What’s special about the brain tissue in the left themisphere?

Discussion: is there an evolutionary purpose for lateralization? What do you think could be the reason behind it?

New ways to discover brain functioning:

PET (Positron Emission Tomography):shows metabolic activity of the brain(How PET works)

Images from PET scans

Childhood brain lesions

Hemiplegic children: have lesions on one side of the brain; shows differing
cognitive abilities

Split brains

surgical severing of the corpus callosum – no communication between two side
of brain

Dichotic Listening

contralateral stimuli (opposite
side) outweigh ipsilateral stimuli

reason: stimuli don’t have to cross the corpus  callosum

(Discussion: Does this make sense? signals from right ear go directly to left side of brain, not through right side of brain; How about your use of the phone – do you hold it to your left ear
or your right ear?)

EEG – based evidence: Event-related Brain Potentials
(ERPs)

Cognitive neurophysiology is the study of changes in brain function and the relationship of such changes to thought processes. The primary physiological signal that we measure is the electroencephalogram or EEG. The EEG reflects summated potentials generated by the electrochemical signaling processes by which networks of neurons process information. The EEG changes in predictable ways as a function of level of alertness, type and/or intensity of mental activity, and particular forms of brain pathology. We record the EEG by arrays of electrodes attached with conductive gel to many locations across the scalp. Similar sensors are attached
to the face in the region of the eyes to record the electro-oculogram or EOG, that is, the electrical potentials generated by eye movements and blinks. The EOG can also provide useful information about mental state.

(Gevins 1997)

For a more in-depth explanation of ERPs: Coles & Rugg 1995

Other interesting applications of ERPs:

Brain Fingerprinting for Counter-Terrorism

Language Perception & learning strategies

Neural basis of musicality

Historical Evidence for Brain Modularity: Studies
of Aphasia Carl Linnaeus (1745) studied jargon
aphasia, a disease in which the patient substitutes a semantically similar word for the intended word.

Johannes Gesner (1770) attributed language difficulties to specific impairment of language memory. He observed bilingual asymmetry in which an abbot who had brain damage could read Latin but not German.

Broca’s aphasics – agrammatic aphasia: utterances
without function words, problems understanding syntactic structure

Wernicke’s aphasics – may produce fluent
but unintelligible speech, substitute one sound for another (table -> sable)
or one word for another. (chair -> table) Also jargon aphasia.

One way that has been tried to help such patients communicate is to have them write the words they want to communicate. In England a Lightwriter has been used to help aphasic patients communicate. Words can be typed and show up on two screens, one for the writer and one for the person they want to communicate with.

Acquired dyslexics: people who lose the ability to read after brain damage

Genetic Evidence for Language Autonomy

Linguistic savants: individuals who are handicapped
in certain spheres but remarkably talented in others

Specific Language Impairment: Seems to have genetic basis, affect identical twins – support modular view of language facility

FoxP2 is the first identified gene that is specifically involved in speech and language development in humans (not in book)

Language and Brain Development

The Critical Period: period from birth to puberty when language acquisition proceeds easily: evidence

For: “wild” children, Genie, Chelsea.

Against: Statistical studies, Bialystok & Hakuta’s chapter; lack of evidence.

Bird Songs: some species learn calls, like these:

Male Chaffinch:  Female Chaffinch: 

But the other’s calls, like that of the
cuckoo, seem to be biologically determined.

Origins of Human Language

Problem: spoken language existed long before written records are preserved.

Beliefs cloud the topic: monogenetic – belief that all langauges originated from a single source (Tower of Babel story)

Exercises:

1.  Roger Sperry
biography

Eccles biography

Fun with electrodes! Probe
the brain

References:

for your reference in doing papers that use online sources: see the APA’s guide to online source citation

Coles, M.G.H., Rugg, M.D. (1995). Event-related brain potentials:
An introduction. In M. Rugg, M. Coles (Eds.), Electrophysiology of Mind. Oxford
University Press: Oxford, U.K. (PDF) Accessed February 6, 2005 at http://whalen.psych.udel.edu/667/1.What_is_ERP/ColesRugg1995chpt1.pdf

Gevins, A. (1997) Neural Signals of Cognition During Computer
Use. Accessed February 6, 2005 at http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/nsf/isgw97/reports/gevins.html

practice |more |still_more | last_chance | key_terms

Talkin’ About Talk:  Can you make a living loving language? Chapter 42 (p.183) and

Why do American Southerners Talk that Way? Chapter 26 (p. 116)

Grammar Review

Grammar Terms document

Dialects Do you have an idiolect?

• Dialect leveling; how has your own dialect changed as a result of moving to the DC area?

Regional Dialects

• caused by communication barriers

Accents

• Refers to non-natives’ speech patterns

Dialects of English

- Types of Differences

• Phonological
• Lexical
• Dialect atlases reflect regional lexical differences
• Syntactic – between you and I / between you and me What would you call these dialects? Wrong & Right?

Standard Dialect

Language Purists

• SAE – idealization
• Language purism crises go back to Greek gramamarians
• Banned Languages
• Cajun English/French
• Native American Languages
• French Academy
• Sign language
• US English imperialism movement
• Language Revival

Latino English

• Code-switching
• Chicano English characteristics
• homonyms caused by fewer vowel sound distinctions
• ch  and sh sounds alternated
• devoicing of some consonants
• initial consonant substitution /th/ and /d/
• consonant cluster simplification (word final)
• prosodic differences
• sequential constraint – word cannot begin with /s/
• Other varieties: Cuban, Puerto Rican, Guatemalan, El Salvadoran

Pidgins & Creoles     What’s the difference between a pidgin & a creole & a

lingua Franca? (let’s do a matching!)

Hatian Creole Examples

Language, Sex & Gender

Robin Lakoff wrote Language & Woman’s Place in the early 70s. A revised edition of the book has been published
Her other work includes Talking Power (1992) and  The Language War (2000)

Nancy Pelosi / Hillary Clinton: Woman or Female?

Sex on the Brain (Commentary on “The Female Brain” and the male/female word debate)

Marked & Unmarked terms
Can you identify a change in the language within your lifetime to reflect awareness of gender-marked forms?
(hint: ladies/women)

Activity: How would you make a change to gender-determined language?

Godself: gender-neutral pronoun for God

Name for men equivalent to ‘slut’ for women

Way to refer to the female president’s husband: Mr. President or First Gentleman?