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LINGUISTICS EXAM I, Exam 3, Note on categories: Syntactic categories (aka…
LINGUISTICS EXAM I
Word Properties
types of words
listeme -- minimal meaningful unit, must be "listed" w meaning that can't be predicted from parts
morpheme (for this class, we'll use morpheme to mean listeme)
phonological words -- sequence of sounds identified as unit on basis of how it's pronounced, may have multiple parts (morphemes)
Signs
sign
signified -- what's being signified? (eg. sweet, crunchy, fall, trees, red, green)
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types of writing systems
alphabets (English, Russia, Greek)
alphabets include symbols which corresponding to sounds of language (so you could read aloud without knowing meaning)
abugidas (Amharic, Hindi)
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abjads (Arabic, Hebrew)
similar to alphabets, abjads use symbols to represent sounds of language, but only have symbols for consonants
syllabary (Japanese katakana, Cherokee (Oklahoma, NC)
one character per syllable, character represents whole syllable (will not find commonality between, for eg. ga gi gu etc.)
logography/morphography (Chinese, Cantonese)
graphemes correspond to meaning of word and don't indicate how to pronounce them (so you could read and understand but have no idea how to pronounce), most languages are not purely logographic
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Borrowing
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language change
sociolinguistics -- study of different types of language contact, document/study change in progress and variation, which over time leads to the kind of diachronic changes we see in English
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prestige -- respect given to a person, status position, or community
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comparative method of reconstruction -- compare words + grammatical structures in languages to determine their relationship to one another, used to reconstruct older languages
Indo-European (from proto-indo-european -- most well-known protolanguage; includes European, Persian, and Northern Indian languages): big language family
4000-3000 BC, cold northern region, forests and not near water (no shared words for "palm tree" or "oak"), used horse + chariot (many IE languages share words for "horse" and "wheel"), broke up around 2500 BC
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cognates -- word/morpheme related to word/morpheme in related (sister) language by virtue of having both descended from single word (morpheme) of protolanguage
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Standards
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standard American: not local, originates from England 19th c. (Intl English) --> influenced big cities, flipped after WWII (started making effort to pronounce Rs for example)
Dictionaries
dictionary functions
OED: descriptive, historical info
Miriam Webster: more emphasis on current living language, gives stylistic device (advice for usage, FAQs about word, etc.)
adding words
how
OED: evidence shows that word has been in use for >10 years, HOWEVER, it can vary (eg. few examples over a long period), has general currency (used with expectation that it will be understood)
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language preservation
tribal languages, "endangered" languages, eg. ojibwe dictionary, wanpanoag language preservation project
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Word meaning
definitions
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problems
inadequate as modes of mental word representations bc they can be too specific or general (Elbourne)
intension vs. extension
extension - the set of all actual chairs in this 'world', type of thing where you can show a picture and someone can identify it
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seemingly unrelated things can have same extensional meaning (eg. unicorns and square circles both = empty set and therefore have same extensional meaning)
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gettier cases, knowledge, justified true belief: you don't know something just because you stumbled into the right answer
Variation
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sign language -- accents expressed through sign variation, speed, rhythm, posture (latter two are hearing accents) etc.
language variables
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synactic: "the car needs washed", "she be telling people she eight"
Word Acquisition
'fast mapping' as in Medina et al (2011) -- one hypothesis formed at first exposure, no alternative hypotheses, more just about confirming or not confirming your existing hypotheses (vs. statistical model -- multiple hypotheses, change weights w input)
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corpus approaches to studying child language (CHILDES, etc.)
allows us to see what children are saying in their natural contexts, also allows us to hear what's being said to them which is good since environments differ
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Exam 3
Slang, Taboo, and Banned Words
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slurs - derogatory terms for a person or group of people (aka epithets, terms of abuse, disparaging terms, perjorative terms
accretion (w respect to slurs) - bc the ideology of slur has remained, it doesn't matter what new term you place there, eventually it will take on the character of the slur
ideology as cueing devices: slur is not just a referect, but it also includes sentiment or contempt for the group of people you're referring to (therefore cues the ideology)
slurs have not migrated robustly away from their sources (vs. something like "fuck" which has SO many meanings that don't refer to original meaning)
have greatest capacity for harm, treated differently than traditional profanity
the HSFN classification (Bergen, classifying bad words) - languages select from a small pool of semantically constrained candidates for their bad words
categories: holy (religion), fucking (sex), shit (bodily excrements), nigger (slurs) -- these aren't the only categories (animals, the dead are also categories)
H-languages: Quebecois French, dialects of Penninsular Spanish
F-languages: Cantonese, Hebrew, Russian
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slang
social meaning - deliberate alt vocab that sends social signals, can signal group identification or attempted association, may indicate current knowledge (usually short-lived)
can be regional, often (coined) in youth and non-mainstream culture, may become "passé" by the time it becomes common
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Multicultural Lexicon
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adult lexicon access across languages (Spivey and Marian 1999) -- different vocabs for different languages can't be "turned off", can create distractor effect
language specialization in babies (Pat Kuhl video) - babies are geniuses until ~age 7 and then ability to acquire new languages decreases dramatically
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Words & Thought
linguistic relativity - looks at questions around linguistics and culture, how much one shapes the other
Sapir and Whorf - language shapes the way we pick things up, language categories allow us to form ideas, linguistic determinism
weak - language influences thought/cognitive processing, has some traction (esp w color perception)
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linguistic gender perception - may have an impact on how we understand and categorize things (think similar objects w different genders challenge)
number perception - language helps w memory encoding (we can't remember things as well if we have no way of encoding), computational problems would become more difficult for people who don't have numerical words
timeline perception - language can affect our perception of past/future (eg. Mandarin vertical+horizontal timeline vs. English horizontal timeline)
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Pronouns
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dimensions of gender
conceptual - expressed/inferred/used by perceiver to classify a referent (typically a generalization of bias)
eg. cowgirl, conceptially, is feminine
eg. she/her/hers, linked to biosocial gender
grammatical - nouns agree w determiners, adjectives
there can actually be both conceptual and grammatical agreement in the same sentence (depends on the language)
since language is our tool for encoding, grammatical can influence biosocial and conceptual gender (eg. how we might accept certain conceptual genders if we have the language to express properly. etc.)
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biosocial - combo of phenotype, socialization, culltural norms, gender expression, gender identity; internal to referent and cannot be determined from the outside directly
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Word Acquisition
"30 Million Word Gap" - child from lower-income household will hear 30 million fewer words directed at them than a child from a higher-income household by age 4
originally came from Hart & Risley study (1995) -- looked at words per hour and unique wph (aka "types") for different income groups
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30M # comes from avg. words per hour over 4 yrs 
s could be inflated or deflated, not exatly certain what it means/measures
replicated in Spery et al study (2018) -- conclusion: there is variation among income brackets, but there doesn't seem to be a strong correlation to income
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Note on categories: Syntactic categories (aka parts of speech) are not based off of meaning -- more helpful to rely on familiarity w grammar to identify categories
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