LANGUAGE STRUCTURE

NAZIA ASIF TAKKHAR

FCC
 INTRODUCTION

• What makes human species special?

• Unmatched ability to solve problems and do reasoning
• They possess language.
• The chapter focuses on the nature of language in general
• How is language processed?
• How is human language different from the language of other species?
• How does language influence human thought?
• How do children acquire a language?
 LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN

• Earlier it was believed that the difference in size of the hemispheres is

responsible for language being left lateralized, which is now a rejected
idea.
• In patients suffering from aphasias (loss of language function) due to
stroke, areas such as Broca’s area (Paul Broca) and Wernicke’s area
(Carl Wernicke) are considered responsible.
 LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN

• Broca’s aphasia – unable to generate almost any speech or in some

cases, meaningful but ungrammatical speech.
• Wernicke’s aphasia – problems with comprehension, produce
grammatical but meaningless speech.
 THE FIELD OF LINGUISTICS

• A field that characterizes the nature of language.

• It studies the structure of natural languages
• Productivity – an infinite number of utterances are possible in any
language.
• Regularity – the utterances are systematic in many ways.
• Creating novel sentences – fighting plagiarism!
THE FIELD OF LINGUISTICS
 THE FIELD OF LINGUISTIC

• A goal of linguistics is to discover a set of rules that will account for both the
productivity and regularity of natural language.
• This set of rules is referred to as grammar.
• This helps us prescribe or generate all acceptable utterances of language and
reject all unacceptable utterances of a language. There are 3 rules:
1. Syntactic – syntax is related to word order. The sentence maybe meaningful
but contains mistakes.
2. Semantic – the meaning of sentences
3. Phonological – the sound structure of sentences
 EXAMPLES OF THE 3 RULES

Syntax:
The girls hits the boys.
Did hit the girl the boys?
The girl hit a boys.
The boys were hit the girl.
 EXAMPLES OF THE 3 RULES

Semantics:
• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• Sincerity frightened the cat.

• These sentences are nonsensical.

 EXAMPLES OF THE 3 RULES

Phonology:
The Inspector opened his notebook. “Your name is Halcock, is’t no?”
he began. The butler corrected him. “H’alcock,” he said, reprovingly.
“H, a, double-l?” suggested the Inspector. “There is no h’aich in the
name, young man. H’ay is the first letter, and there is h’only one h’ell.”

The letter h is dropped and every word beginning with a vowel is mispronounced.
 LINGUISTIC INTUITIONS

• Judgment about the nature of linguistic utterances.

• We can judge if a sentence is ill formed either because of a syntactic
structure error, or because they lack meaning
• Intuition about paraphrase.
• The girl hit the boy.
• The boy was hit by the girl
 LINGUISTIC INTUITIONS

• Intuition about ambiguity such as the structural ambiguity - when an

entire phrase or sentence has two or more meanings
• They are cooking apples.

• Lexical Ambiguity – when a word has 2 or more distinct meanings

• I am going to the bank.
 COMPETENCE VS PERFORMANCE

• Our common everyday language consists of hesitation, stuttering, sentences

with poor grammar, slips of the tongue and slangs.
• We misunderstand the meaning of sentences.
• We hear sentences that are ambiguous but do not note their ambiguity
• Noam Chomsky – distinguished between:
1. Competence – a person’s abstract knowledge in speaking or listening
2. Performance – The actual application of that knowledge
They both may not always correspond.
 SYNTACTIC FORMALISMS
A SET OF CONCEPTS THAT DESCRIBE THE
STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE
 PHRASE STRUCTURE

• A sentence is divided into hierarchical units, called phrases.

• The brave dog saved the drowning child.
• Nouns and verbs
 PAUSE STRUCTURE

• To plan the next phrase

• To emphasize on the importance of what is said.
• People pause briefly after each meaningful unit of speech.
 SPEECH ERRORS

• Slip of the tongue

• I have taken a summer curse
• You have hissed all my mystery lectures
• Exchanges – when two phonemes switch. Night life – nife lite
• Anticipation – an early phoneme is changed to a later phoneme. Take
my bike – bake my bike
• Substitutions of sounds and words
 TRANSFORMATIONS

• Moving elements from one part of the sentence to another part.

John believes the dog is chasing Bill down the street.

• John believes what is chasing Bill down the street?

• What does John believe is chasing Bill down the street?
WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT HUMAN
LANGUAGE?
• All social species communicate with one another .
Semanticity and arbitrariness:
The communication system of dogs also consists of non verbal
• Snarl, exposing the neck.
Displacement in time and space
When a honeybee returns to a nest after finding a food source, it will
engage in a dance to communicate the location of the food source. The “dance”
consists of a straight run followed by a turn to the right to circle back to the
starting point, another straight run, followed by a turn and circle to the left, and
so on, in an alternating pattern. The length of the run indicates the distance of
the food and the direction of the run relative to vertical indicates the direction
relative to the sun.
WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT HUMAN
LANGUAGE?
Discreteness and productivity:
• Discrete units which enable the elements of language to be combined into an
infinite number of phrase structures.
• People all across the world, speak a language
• Attempt to teach language to monkeys have failed miserably
• Humans have a vocal apparatus that has undergone evolutionary adaptations
• American Sign Language - modest success
• Chimpanzees could acquire vocabularies of more than a 100 signs, they never used
them with the productivity of humans
KANZI – A BONOBO
 THE RELATION BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND
THOUGHT
• Humans have it in their genetic makeup to learn language.
• General human intellectual abilities are special and capable of making
us learn language.
• What is the relationship between language and thought?
1. Thought depends in various ways on language.
2. Language depends in various ways on thought.
3. They are two independent systems.
 LANGUAGE DEPENDS ON THOUGHT

 The Behaviorist Proposal

• John B. Watson held that there is no such thing as internal mental activity.
• Humans simply emit responses that have been conditioned to various stimuli
• Thinking is simply subvocal speech – talking to themselves.
• What about when people are silently thinking? Watson believed they think with their whole
bodies.
• Thought is more than subvocal speech – a person with no apparent language still gives
evidence of thinking.
• Sultan and problem solving

The behaviorists believed that thought consists only of covert speech and other implicit motor
actions, but evidence has shown that thought can proceed in the absence of any motor
activity.
 THE WHORFIAN HYPOTHESIS OF LINGUISTIC
DETERMINISM
• This is the claim that language determines or strongly influences the
way a person thinks or perceives the world.
• Benjamin Whorf (1956) – different languages emphasize in different
aspects of the world.
• Language influences how people think about the world.
• Eskimos have different words for snow, Arabs have various words for
camels
 DOES LANGUAGE DEPEND ON THOUGHT?

• Thinking ability develops sooner than the ability to use language.

• Children even before their speech is developed, give evidence of
complex cognition.
• If we accept the idea that thought evolved before language, it seems
natural to suppose that language arose as a tool whose function was to
communicate thought.
 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

• Children are notoriously noisy creatures from birth.

• At first, there is little variety in their speech. Their vocalizations
• consist almost totally of an ah sound
• At about 6 months, they begin to engage in what is called babbling, which consists of
generating a rich variety of speech.
• However, the sounds are generally totally meaningless.
• They often use a single word to communicate a whole thought.
• The one-word stage, which lasts about 6 months, is followed by a stage in which children will
put two words together.
• Even when children leave the two-word stage and speak in sentences ranging from three to
eight words, their speech is referred to as telegraphic.
• Singular/plural and word order.
A CRITICAL PERIOD FOR LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
• Young children appear to acquire a second language much faster than
older children or adults do.
• 2-12 years is the critical period when it is the easiest to learn a
language.
• The exposure may vary.
• Syntactic knowledge may not differ but phonological knowledge does.
• American Sign language