Essentials of Linguistics Essentials of Linguistics CATHERINE ANDERSON MCMASTER UNIVERSITY HAMILTON, ONTARIO Essentials of Linguistics by Catherine Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Contents About the Book 1 About the Author 3 Acknowledgements 5 Part I. Chapter 1: Thinking Like a Linguist 1.1 Linguistics is Science 9 2.3 Creativity and Generativity 19 4.4 Fundamental Properties of Language 24 5. Summary 33 Part II.
Chapter 2: Producing Speech Sounds 7.1 How Humans Produce Speech 37 8.3 Describing Speech Sounds: the IPA 48 10.4 IPA symbols and speech sounds 54 11.5 Sonority, Consonants, and Vowels 58 12.9 Various Accents of English 77 16. Summary 85 Part III. Chapter 3: Transcribing Speech Sounds 18.1 Broad and Narrow Transcription 89 19.2 IPA for Canadian English 91 20.4 Aspirated Stops in English 98 22.5 Articulatory Processes: Assimilation 104 23.6 Other Articulatory Processes 108 24.8 Transcribing Casual Speech 117 26. Summary 125 Part IV.
Chapter 4: Speech Sounds in the Mind 28.1 Phonemes and Contrast 129 29.2 Allophones and Predictable Variation 135 30.3 Phonetic Segments and Features 140 31. Chapter 5: Psycholinguistics of Learning Sounds 35.1 How Babies Learn the Phoneme Categories of 167 Their Language 36.2 How Adults Learn the Phoneme Categories in a 173 New Language 37. Summary 179 Part VI. Chapter 6: Word Forms 39.1 Words and Morphemes 183 40.5 Inflectional Morphology in Some Indigenous 199 Languages 44.
Summary 206 Part VII. Chapter 7: Combining Words 46.1 Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives: Open Class 209 Categories 47.3 Closed Class Categories (Function Words) 219 49.5 Neurolinguistics: Syntactic Category Differences 224 in the Brain 51. Summary 231 Part VIII. Chapter 8: Forming Sentences 53.2 X-bar Phrase Structure 239 55.4 Sentences are Phrases 250 57.5 English Verb Forms 256 58.12 Psycholinguistics: Traces in the Mind 299 65.
Summary 306 Part IX. Chapter 9: Sentence Structure and Meaning 67.2 Events, Participants, and Thematic Roles 313 69.3 Thematic Roles and Passive Sentences 320 70.4 Neurolinguistics: Using EEG to Investigate 324 Syntax and Semantics 71.5 Neurolinguistics and Second Language Learning 329 72. Chapter 10: Word Meanings 74.1 Elements of Word Meaning: Intensions and 341 Extensions 75.2 Intensions in the Mind 346 76.3 Psycholinguistics of Word Meanings 350 77. Summary 356 Part XI.
Chapter 11: Indigenous Languages 79.1 Indigenous Languages and the Legacy of 359 Residential Schools 80.4 Mohawk Culture and Language 371 83.5 Creating Materials for Teaching Mohawk 376 84.6 Speaking Mohawk and Reconciliation 382 85.7 The Future of Indigenous Languages in Canada 385 86. Summary 390 Part XII. Back Matter Test 88. Testing Keys 393 References 419 Keys 421 About the Book About Essentials of Linguistics This Open Educational Resource (OER) brings together Open Access content from around the web and enhances it with dynamic video lectures about the core areas of theoretical linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics), supplemented with discussion of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic findings.
Essentials of Linguistics is suitable for any beginning learner of linguistics but is primarily aimed at the Canadian learner, focusing on Canadian English for learning phonetic transcription, and discussing the status of Indigenous languages in Canada. Drawing on best practices for instructional design, Essentials of Linguistics is suitable for blended classes, traditional lecture classes, and for self-directed learning. No prior knowledge of linguistics is required. To the Student Your instructor might assign some parts or all of this OER to support your learning, or you may choose to use it to teach yourself introductory linguistics.
You might decide to read the textbook straight through and watch the videos in order, or you might select specific topics that are of particular interest to you. However you use the OER, we recommend that you begin with Chapter 1, which provides fundamentals for the rest of the topics. You will also find that if you complete the quizzes and attempt the exercises, you’ll achieve a better understanding of the material in each chapter. 1 | About the Book To the Instructor You may use Essentials of Linguistics as a stand-alone textbook or as a supplement to a traditional textbook.
The OER is suitable for an in-person, blended or fully online course. Because this is an entirely open resource, its content is licensed under a Creative Common Attribution 4. International License; therefore, you are free to redistribute, revise, remix, and retain any of the parts of the eTextbook. About the Book | 2 About the Author Photo credit: Colin Czerneda, 2017 Catherine Anderson Catherine Anderson is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Languages at McMaster University.
She earned a Ph. in Linguistics from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Anderson conducts research on undergraduate learning and 3 | About the Author curriculum in linguistics. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario, with her partner and their school-aged twins.
About the Author | 4 Acknowledgements This project was funded by a grant from the Open Textbook Initiative of eCampusOntario for adoption and adaptation of existing resources and supported by McMaster University’s Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation and Excellence in Teaching. Anastassiya Yudintseva was the Instructional Designer for the project, and Kendrick Potvin was the Digital Media Specialist. Zafar Syed also provided oversight.
Most of the material included in this ebook originated in Dr. Anderson’s Introduction to Linguistics courses, the blended design of which was supported by McMaster University’s Humanities Media and Computing, especially Katrina Espanol-Miller, with financial support from the Faculty of Humanities and the Department of Linguistics. This ebook also incorporates material adapted from How Language Works by Michael Gasser, under a GNU Free Documentation License. Special thanks go to David Kanatawakhon-Maracle for his contributions to Chapter 11.
Captions for the videos were the work of a capable team of students from Dr. Anderson’s Ling 2SY3 class: Maryam Ahmed, Brianna Borean, Carina Chan, Elena Davis, Meliha Horzum, Emiliya Krichevskaya, Thea Robinson, Connor Savery, Saloni Tattar, and Kathryn Williams. 5 | Acknowledgements Acknowledgements | 6 PART I CHAPTER 1: THINKING LIKE A LINGUIST In this chapter, we begin to consider the ways that linguists think about language, especially the idea that linguists strive to make systematic observations of human language behaviour. Linguists don’t spend time prescribing how people should or shouldn’t use their language! One of the challenges of observing how humans use language is that a lot of what we do with language happens in our minds.
Of course, it’s relatively simple to observe the words that we speak or write, but it’s much harder to observe the processes that unfold in someone’s mind when they’re listening to someone speaking, understanding them, and thinking up a reply. Part of learning to do linguistics is learning some of the techniques linguists have for drawing conclusions about these mental processes. In Chapter 1 we also discuss the fundamental attributes of human language and discover the five core components that make up the grammar of every human language. When you’ve completed this chapter, you will be able to: • differentiate between prescriptive and descriptive ways of thinking about language, • identify five components of mental grammar, • recognize common misconceptions about language.
7 | Chapter 1: Thinking Like a Linguist 1.1 Linguistics is Science This unit introduces the idea of thinking scientifically about language by making empirical observations rather than judgments of correctness. A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://ecampusontario.1 Linguistics is Science Check Yourself 1. What does it mean to say that Linguistics is a science? • The field consists of a set of true facts that can be proven objectively.
• The field uses the scientific method to determine objective rankings of language quality. • The field uses empirical observations to develop theories of language behaviour. Each of the following sentences represents something someone might say about language. Which of them illustrates a descriptive view of language? • The use of quotative like in sentences such as, “She was like, I can’t believe you did that!” began to enter Canadian English with the generation of speakers born in 1971.
• The song “I can’t get no satisfaction” should really mean that “I can get some satisfaction” because two negatives always make a positive. • In a phrase like, “the people who the bride invited to the wedding,” it’s proper to use whom rather than who. Which of the following kinds of data would a linguist be likely to observe? • Which method is most effective to help a child stop stuttering. • Whether Korean includes tones that change the meaning of words.
• How many undergraduates can correctly use the words affect and effect in their essays. • If second-language speakers can pronounce English words correctly.1 Linguistics is Science | 10 Answers Video Script Linguistics is one of those subjects that not many people have heard of, so you might well be wondering exactly what it is. The simplest definition of Linguistics is that it’s the science of language. This is a simple definition but it contains some very important words.
First, when we say that linguistics is a science, that doesn’t mean you need a lab coat and safety goggles to do linguistics. Instead, what it means is that the way we ask questions to learn about language uses a scientific approach. The scientific way of thinking about language involves making systematic, empirical observations. There’s another important word: empirical means that we observe data to find the evidence for our theories.
All scientists make empirical observations: botanists observe how plants grow and reproduce. Chemists observe how substances interact with other. Linguists observe how people use their language. A crucial thing to keep in mind is that the observations we make about language use are NOT value judgments.
Lots of people in the world — like your high school English teacher, various newspaper columnists, maybe your grandparents, and maybe even some of your friends — make judgments about how people use language. But linguists don’t. A short-hand way of saying this is that linguists have a descriptive approach to language, not a prescriptive approach.1 Linguistics is Science We describe what people do with their language, but we don’t prescribe how they should or shouldn’t do it. This descriptive approach is consistent with a scientific way of thinking.
Think about an entomologist who studies beetles. Imagine that scientist observes that a species of beetle eats leaves. She’s not going to judge that the beetles are eating wrong, and tell them that they’d be more successful in life if only they eat the same thing as ants. No — she observes what the beetle eats and tries to figure out why: she develops a theory of why the beetle eats this plant and not that one.
In the same way, linguists observe what people say and how they say it, and come up with theories of why people say certain things or make certain sounds but not others. In our simple definition of linguistics, there’s another important word we need to focus on: linguistics is the science of human language. There are plenty of species that communicate with each other in an impressive variety of ways, but in linguistics, our job is to focus on the unique system that humans use. It turns out that humans have some important differences to all other species that make our language unique.
First, what we call the articulatory system: our lungs, larynx & vocal folds, and the shape of our tongue, teeth, lips, nose, all enable us to produce speech. No other species can do this in the way we can, not even our closest genetic relatives the chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans. Second, our auditory system is special: our ears are sensitive to exactly the frequencies that are most common in human speech. There are other species that have similar patterns of auditory sensitivity, but human newborns pay special attention to human speech, even more so than synthetic speech that is matched for acoustic characteristics.
And most important of all, our neural system is special: no other 1.