-
Prescriptive grammar
Grammar rules, invented by experts, grammarians not always followed
-
Descriptive Grammar
What native speakers know about their language
-
Language is arbitrary
no sound meaning connection except for onomatopoeic
-
Creative aspect of language use
- Every utterance and combination is new and situational
- -difference between human and animal communication
-
Universal Grammar
Noam Chomsky - universal properties of all languages -language is innate
-
Arguements for universal grammar
- -children are able to acquire language quickly and easily
- -acquisition errors, overgeneralizing rules (brought, bringed)
- -creative aspect
-
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
- Linguistic determination- We are at the mercy of our language-it limits the way we interpret and think about the world
- (Light- Linguistic relativism - languages shapes the way we think)
- -but we can stil describe things we don't have words for
-
Lesion
An area of sever damage to the brain, caused by a stroke or trauma
-
Aphasia
A language deficit caused by damage to the brain.
-
Broca's Area
- Nonfluent aphasia, agrammatism-halting speech, short utterances
- -lack of function words/morphemes (telegraphic speech)
- Comprehension of language but may be confused by function words
- (syntactic matters)
-
Wernicke's aphasia
- Fluent aphasia - can produce normally intoned connected speech with function words
- -difficulty understanding content words
- - some words may be nonsense or not fit the context
- (Lexical matters)
-
Transcortical sensory aphasia
repetition, no comprehension
-
Anomic aphasia
damage in the parietal area, inability to name things, find words
-
Dichotic listening
- linguistic stimuli to right ear
- nonverbal stimuli to left
- (contralateralization)
-
Correlation between language and intelligence
One can be fluent and cognitively impaired (savants)
-
Critical period
- birth to 9 years
- -late exposure to language alters fundamental organization of the brain
- - children exposed later do not fully gain liguistic fluency
-
Evolution of language
- earliest written records 6,000 years ago
- Monogenetic theory- all languages from same source
- -language is imitative, emotional cries of nature
- etc
-
Morpheme
- the smallest unit of sound and meaning
- runn-ing cat-s black-ens runn-er
- words like car, true, thank are monomorphemic
- leftover cannot be split up into morphemes- loses meaning
-
Content morphems vs function morphemes
- content - kick, boy, yellow
- function- bits of syntactic structure- prepositions, grammatical notions -ed or-s
-
Bound vs free morphemes
- bound- cannot stand on their own, must be affixed
- free- can stand alone
-
Derivational and Inflectional affixes
- derivational - change the meaning or part of speech (un-, ness)
- inflectional - create a different form of the same word (plural -s past tense -ed)
-
Types of bound morphemes
affixes, suffixes, prefixes and in other languages circumfixes and infixes
-
Allomorphs
- the same meaning unit has more than one sound
- form
- ox / oxen
- but not box / boxen
- irregular allomorphs must be memorized
|
|
