LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS

*Charles Fillmore was one of the founders of Cognitive Linguistics, he was an American linguistic and Emeritus Professor of linguistic at the University of California.

*Grammar case is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the violence or the number of subjects.

*Fundamental hypothesis is the theory that analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases. an example can be:

'Mary  open the door with key'

CLICK HERE TO MAKE THE ACTIVITY :D

GENERATIVE SEMANTICS

*Semantics is the branch of linguistic and logic concerned with meaning.

*Generative semantics is a description of a language emphasizing a semantic deep structure that is logical in form, that provides syntactic structure, and that is related to surface structure by transformations.

*Transformational grammar is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition.

*In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories:
- Distinction between competence and performance, Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors.
- Evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky distinguished between grammars that achieve descriptive adequacy and those that go further and achieved explanatory adequacy.
-Grammar rule which provide an interpretation for the sentence is semantic rule.
-Grammar rule which specify the deep structure into a surface structure of the sentence and the transform that deep structure into a surface structure is syntactic rule.
-Grammar rule which specify information necessary in pronouncing the sentence is phonological rule.
-Charles Fillmore introduced what was termed case structure, grammar and this representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists.
-The semantic structure is the result of a process by which real entities inside the mind of the speaker-concepts-are translated into semantic units that are combined in varying configurations of complexity.


Activity about Generative Semantics

FORMALISM BY NOAM CHOMSKY

*A context-free grammar provides a simple and mathematically precise mechanism for describing the methods by which phrases in some natural language are built from smaller blocks, capturing the "block structure" of sentences in a natural way.

*The linguistic formalism derived from Noam Chomsky.

*In Chomsky's generative grammar, the syntax of natural language was described by a context-free rules combined with transformation rules.

*The framework idea of formulating grammar consisting of explicit rewrite rules was abandoned.

*The formalist propositions regarding innateness and stimuli do fit extensively with the cognitive opposition to behaviouristic psychology.

*Chomsky's position can be characterized as a continuation of essential principles of structuralist theory from Saussure.

*Mathematical logic, the discipline which studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics.

Its applications are found in theoretical linguistics, formal language theory, theoretical computer science, formal semantics, and other areas.




CLICK HERE TO MAKE THE ACTIVITY

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE WITH THE SECOND PART OF THE ACTIVITY

The American Structuralism: Leonard Bloomfield

ACTIVITY ABOUT THE TOPIC

The American Structuralism: Leonard Bloomfield

Sapir concluded that a minimum for human language is formation and expression of concrete and relational ideas.
language can be seen as the totality of mutually effective substitute responses.

Mentalism differs from materialism by distinguishing langue from parole. It opposes wholes or parts to material and formal principles; mind to brain; understanding to experiencing.

Mentalism is dualistic because it recognizes mental and material

Behaviorism is monistic: It admits only a single kind of data (material)

When one speaks a sentence, the form it takes is due to the utterances which the speaker, since infancy has heard from other members of his community.

The study, use and spread of language. Bloomfield proposes that the empirical science of language should study a real rather than a fancied object.

Language conceived as a normative ideal does not constitute an empirical object; language as a universal phenomenon can only be established inductively; one can

observe actual speech----and its actual effects on hearers---without preconceptions, so the Behaviorist approach provides a model.

Speech communities are best observed behavioristically. Density of communication can be empirically observed, quantified, and correlated with geography, social stratification, occupation, success in cooperation, and consequences in describable speech differences.

There are behavioral correlates for determining traditional concerns about language:

pThe literary standard

pThe colloquial standard

pThe provincial standard

pSub-standard

pLocal dialect

The phoneme. Sound-production can be described empirically. Phonetics is the branch of science that deals with it.

What phonetics provides is an objective record of gross acoustic features, only part of which are distinctive for particular languages, while phonology, or practical phonetics, determines which features are the distinctive ones.

Phonetic basis.  This predominantly phonetic account ‘may be viewed as a kind of basis which may be modified in various ways’.

Modification, presumes some standard from which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can vary, legitimately or inconsistently.

For instance, it might be inconsistent to shift, in phonology, from subjective, or objective production to subjective reception or objective disturbance of the air, or from objective measurement to subjective standards.

Grammatical Forms

Descriptive Structuralism is frequently referred to as Binarist. This orientation is its strength and weakness. The strength resides in elementary calculability, an impersonal, objective, exhausting of possibilities: given any A, B pair, however defined, the presence or absence of a value for each, however defined, can be calculated. With values of + or -  :

  A:   +  -  +  -

  B:  +  +  -  -

  Its weakness is identical with that of Plato’s technique of the Division: in the conceptual world, we rarely know enough about any pair to establish exclusive values beyond the most generic; in the empirical world, factual relations are just as complex.

Stable States

Synchronic linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, some forms are never observable in isolated utterance. This justifies the distinction of free and bound forms, when both are established as linguistic forms. Constructed linguistic forms have at least two, so A’ linguistic form which bears a partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to some other linguistic form is a complex form and the common parts are constituents or components, while A’ linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form is a simple form or morpheme

Basic and modified meaning

The meaning of a morpheme is a sememe (the meaning of a morpheme), constant, definite, discrete from all other sememes: the linguist can only analyze the signals, not the signalled, so that is why linguistics must start from the phonetics, not the semantics, of a language. The total stocks of morphemes is a language’s lexicon.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS

Excercise about anthropological linguistics

Anthropological linguistic is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language.

Linguistic anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.

Franz Boas was one of the principal founders of modern American Anthropology and Ethnology.

Boas was appointed lecturer in physical anthropology at Columbia University in 1896.

Even Boas has been called "Father of American Anthropology" and "Father of modern Anthropology"

During his lifetime Sapir was highly regarded for his work on language his groundbreaking studies of Native American languages.

Linguistic relativity is a general term used to refer to various hypotheses or positions about the relationship between language and culture.

For Sapir, linguistic relativity was a way of articulating what he saw as the struggle between the individual and society.

The Descriptivists

During the years at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries when Saussure was working out his ideas in Europe, synchronic linguistics was emerging independently, and in a very different style, in America under the leadership of the anthopologist Franz Boas set a direction for American linguistics which turned out to be enormously fruitful, and which was never seriously disputed until Noam Chomsky appeared on the scene in the late 1950's.

The Descriptivist tended to think of abstract linguistic theorizing as a means to the end of successful practical description of particular languages, rather than thinking of individual languages as sources of data for the construction of a general theory of language. It is true, of course, that the most eminent of the Descriptivists are well known because, they did theorize about language in general; but in all cases their general theories were backed up by intensive research on the detailed structure of various exotic languages, and many of their less famous colleagues and followers preferred to take the theories for granted and concentrate on the data.

The fact that Boas was a purely self-thaught linguist was an advantage rather than a hindrance in dealing with American Indian languages, since it was necessary in approaching them to discard any presuppositions about the nature of language inherited from a European background. A characteristic of the school founded by Boas was its relativism. There was no ideal type of language, to which actual languages approximated more or less closely; human languages were endlessly diverse, and although the structure of a language spoken by some primitive tribe might strike us as very 'arbitrary' and irrational, there was no basis of truth in such a judgement: our European languages would appear just as irrational to a member of that tribe.

Pragmatics

To answer the crossword, click here