discovering language (structures of modern english)

8/4/2019 Discovering Language (Structures of Modern English)

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The Structure of Modern English

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The Levels of Language

Phonetics The physical properties of speech

Phonology The study of linguistic sounds

Morphology The study of word structure

SyntaxThe study of utterance/sentence

structure

Text/discourse The study of higher-levelstructures

ContextThe influence of situation,

participants and functions


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*The Hierarchy of Linguistic Levels


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is concerned with the production andreception of speech sounds, and insome ways is closer to the natural

sciences (biology and physics) than tolinguistics.

Note also that although a great deal of phonetics is concernedwith small speech sounds, there are other aspects of thephysical production of language that are not made up of suchsmall units. These include stress, including word-stress, andintonation


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*is the study of the sounds that

human beings use to communicate

through language, and it is mostlyconcerned with individual speech

sounds that follow each other in a

linear fashion.

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Acoustic Phonetics

*is concerned with investigating howthe sounds of speech are transmitted

through the air between speaker and

hearer.


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Auditory Phonetics

*is concerned with how hearersreceive the sounds of speech and

decode (that is, understand) them.


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Articulatory Phonetics

*Is the production end of the process how the speaker creates the sounds.

Unlike the other subfields it is closer

to the biological than to the physicalsciences.


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The production of human speech

originates in the lungs as most

human speech sounds are

articulated on an outgoing breath.

This process is known as the

egressive pulmonary airstreammechanism.

The speech sounds of most human

languages are made as we breathe

out. Once the air has left the lungs

it travels up the trachea and leavesthe body through the mouth, and

sometimes also through the nose.

On the way it may be modified by a

number of the vocal organs. These

modifications are responsible for

making the EAS differently,

depending on where the airflow isrestricted and by how much.


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Before the expelled gases leave the

body through the mouth and nose

they pass through the larynx. This isa box made of cartilage thatcontains two folds of flesh known as

the vocal folds.

The latter are joined together at

the front of the larynx, at the point

where the cartilage walls meet.

Towards the rear of the larynx, the

vocal folds are attached by muscles

to the arytenoid cartilage, and thismechanism can pull them close

together or keep them apart, as inquiet breathing. The vocal folds also

have more specialized linguistic

and musical functions, such as

voicing and, related to this, the

ability to change pitch when singingand to add intonation to speech.


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Above the larynx there is a muscular tube known as the

pharynx, which leads to the back of the mouth. The

pharynx is able to contract, thus squeezing the airflowand causing a class of sounds. Once past the pharynx, the

egressive airstream has a choice of direction. From here

the air can escape through the mouth or the nasal cavity.

When the sounds to be made are not nasal in tone thevelum or soft palate is pulled back to make contact withthe back of the pharynx, thus cutting off the nasal cavity

route.

A number of parts of the mouth are used to modify the

sound of the passage of air: the uvulum, velum, palate,

alveolum, teeth, lips and tongue.


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is the study of the sound system of

particular human languages, including

dialects and other language varieties.

At this level of study it may seem to

be similar to the study of phonetics

because the transcription systemsused are quite similar.


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*The difference between phonetics and

phonology is that phonetics tries to get as close

as possible to describing exactly what is going

on in the mouth, whereas phonology is onlyinterested in the extent to which sounds are

contrastive in the language; that is, cause

meaning change. This difference is analogous to

the difference between studying an alphabetsystem and analyzing handwriting styles or

fonts.


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(from the Greek: ,phnma, "a sounduttered")

is the smallest segmental unit of sound employedto form meaningful contrasts between

utterances.


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*Minimal pairs are sets of words (often,

but not only, pairs) that differ

phonetically, but only in one way at a

time. For example the following Englishwords differ in only their initial

consonant:

pot, tot, cot, hot


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pot, tot, cot, hot

*This set of words provides evidence that the sounds /p/,

/t/, /k/ and /h/ are phonemes of English, because itmakes a difference which one you say in the identical

context of the vowel // followed by a /t/. The

similarity in their pronunciation is evident in the spelling

as well as the transcription, but more complex words donot have straightforward spellings in English and

transcriptions are needed to show that the words are

indeed minimally different.


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is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds

(orphones) used to pronounce a

single phoneme. For example, [p] (as inpin)

and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for thephoneme /p/ in the English language.

Although a phoneme's allophones are all

alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the

specific allophone selected in a given situation is

often predictable.


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is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds

or forms appearing in the sameenvironment without a change in meaning

and without being considered incorrect

by native speakers.

Ex. Economics Finance


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*One consequence of putting phonemes

together in close proximity is that theysometimes become more like each other

than they would be in isolation.


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*One consequence of putting phonemes

together in close proximity is that theysometimes become more like each other

than they would be in isolation.

*It is either anticipatory (also called regressive) orretrospective (also called progressive).


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*Anticipatory

It is when the end of the first wordanticipates some aspect of the beginning of

the second one.


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Orthographic Version Careful Pronunciation Assimilation

Bad Man bdmn bbmn

Good times GdtaImz Gttaimz

Give me gIvmi: gImmi:

Anticipatory


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Orthographic Version Careful Pronunciation Assimilation

Whos this? hu:zis huzzis

In that car Ink: Innkk

Save them seIvm seIvvm

Retrospective


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*Another process that takes place in

connected speech is elision, which

involves the loss of a sound that would bearticulated in a careful pronunciation.

*The most frequently elided consonants inEnglish are /t/ and /d/, particularly when

they occur between other consonants,


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Orthographic Version Careful Pronunciation Elided Version

Handsome /hndsm/ /hnsm/

Windmill /wIndmIl/ /wInmIl/

Mostly /mostlI:/ /mosli/

Kindness /kaIndns/ /kaInns/

Retrospective


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*To aid the flow of speech, consonants and

vowels are sometimes added to words in a

casual style when they would not bepronounced if the word was said on its

own. This is known as insertion. The mostcommon examples occur when the first

word ends in a vowel and the second

begins with a vowel.


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*The inserted consonants are usually

approximants, /r/, /j/ and /w/,

because they are less consonant-likethan the other consonants and

detract less obviously from the

vowels in the two words.


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*morphology is the study of thestructure of words in a language and

it considers the individual parts ofthe word, commonly called

morphemes, as the smallest unit of

meaning in the language.


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*Though it is not a familiar term outside

linguistics, the morpheme is one of the

most useful concepts introduced intwentieth-century linguistic theory, as it

gives a generic name to those units of

language that fall between phonology and

syntax and were previously known only by

different names (prefix, suffix, base, and

so on) according to their behavior.


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*Free morphemes are essentially the

words of the language with no

additions, whereas bound morphemesare the affixes that are added to freemorphemes to alter their

grammatical effect in various ways.


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*Derivation is the process by

which words have a morphemeadded that changes their meaning

and often their class.

*Mature maturation

*motivate motivation

*create creation

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*Note that maturation is a process (of becoming mature),

whilst motivation is usually more of a product than a

process, and creation can be either a product or a

process:

*The maturation of the cheese takes place

over a few weeks.

*My motivation was the result of your

encouragement.

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*The inflectional morphemes in English are all

suffixes, that is, they are all bound morphemes

added to the end of the base word. Whatcharacterizes them is that they are fairly

regular, in both form and meaning, and apply to

all the members of a word class. It is also

important to note that the inflectionalmorphemes do not change the class of the word,

but alter the grammatical form in ways that are

relevant to the word class concerned.

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*The principle of compounding is that the

meaning of the resulting word is not simply the

sum of its parts, but has a further meaning thatcould not immediately be predicted by someone

who knew the meaning of the free morphemes

individually.

*Thus blackboardis more than simply any board that happens to be

black; it has a specific function in educational settings and

incidentally is not always black.

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*The grammatical category of a compound

word in English is always the same as the

category of the second (or last) free

morpheme. Thus a noun plus nouncombination will be a noun overall (for

example sledgehammer), as will an adjective

plus noun combination (for example high

school), whereas a noun plus verb combination

will be a verb (for example water-ski) and a

noun plus adjective combination will be an

adjective (for examplefire-retardant).


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* A noun is a word used to refer to people,

animals, objects, substances, states,

events and feelings. Nouns can be asubject or an object of a verb, can be

modified by an adjective and can take an

article or determiner.

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*Nouns make up one of the largest wordclasses in English and were traditionally

taught in primary school as namingwords.

*The word comes fromthe Latinnomen meaning "name".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin


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Ask a partner to provide the nouns for A NounPoem. Use the list below. When the list is

complete, write the nouns in the poem. Donot let your partner see the poem until youare through!

NOUN LIST

1. Noun/Thing _____________________________

2. Noun/Person (classmate) __________________

3. Noun/Place ______________________________

4. Noun/Place ______________________________

5. Noun/Person _____________________________

6. Noun/Person _____________________________

7. Noun/Thing ______________________________


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My, 1._____________ my, 1._____________ I love it! Itscool.

Id like to buy one for 2._____________ at school.

I bring mine with me wherever I go, from

3._____________ to 4._____________ to Baguio.

My friends 5._____________ and 6._____________ say a

7._____________ is more useful.

But I feel that I must remain truthful: I will hold my1._____________ close to my heart and hope that we

never, ever must part!


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*Verbs are the other very large lexicalword class in English, and were

traditionally called doing words when

taught to young children. Like the nounclass, the lexical verb class is moreinclusive than the label implies as there

are verbs (for example have, be) which donot describe doing, but being, or states,

rather than processes.


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*The adjective word class is smaller

than the noun and verb classes, andhas both a more restricted set of

forms than the verb and a more

limited set of functions than thenoun.

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Adjectives are words that describe or

modify another person or thing in thesentence.

The Articlesa, an, and the areadjectives.


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PositiveComparative

Superlative


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Used in comparing twopersons or things.


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Used in comparing three or

more persons or things.


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The word than frequentlyaccompanies the

comparative.

The word the precedes the

superlative.


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The inflected suffixes -erand -est

suffice to form most comparativesand superlatives, although we need

-ierand -iest when a two-syllable

adjective ends in y(happier andhappiest); otherwise we use more

and most when an adjective has

more than two syllables.


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Positive Comparative Superlative

rich richer richest

lovely lovelier loveliest

beautiful more beautiful most beautiful


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Certain adjectives have irregular forms in the comparative and

superlative degrees.

Irregular Comparative and Superlative Forms

good better best

bad worse worst

little less leastmuch

many

some

more most

far further furthest


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*The final lexical word class is the adverbclass. In many ways this is the least class-

like of all as it consists of a number ofsubclasses that have relatively little in

common, except that they do not perform

the most central roles in the clause and

are often not essential to the grammatical

completeness of the utterance in which

they occur.

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*An adverb is a part of speech that

describes or modifies a verb, an

adjective, another adverb, clause, or

sentence.

*Adverbs answer the questions "How?","When?", "Where?", "Why?", "In what way?",

"How much?", "How often?", "Under what

condition", "To what degree?"


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*Pronouns, although a grammatical class,

function syntactically in similar ways to

the noun class because they can be

subjects, objects and complements. This

makes sense because their role is to

substitute for more complex nouns and

noun phrases in order to make thelanguage more efficient and avoid

repetition.


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The late President Corazon Aquino is

the first Filipino female president.President Corazon Aquino is the wifeof the late Senator Benigno Ninoy

Aquino, Senator Benigno NinoyAquino was assassinated in theTarmac of the Manila InternationalAirport.


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The late President Corazon Aquino isthe first Filipino female president.

She is the wife of the late Senator

Benigno Ninoy Aquino, who wasassassinated in the Tarmac of the

Manila International Airport.


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The late President Corazon

Aquino was an icon ofPhilippine democracy. She

will always be loved and

remembered.

Antecedent

Pronoun


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A word, phrase or clause

referred to by a pronoun.

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*Sentence, Phrases and Clauses

*Semantics

*Theories, Text and Contexts


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*Prepositions

*Conjunctions

*Determiners


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