LINGUISTICS

Linguistics
 Origin of the language

We simply do not know how language originated.

We do know that spoken language developed well before written language.

this absence of evidence speculations about the origins of human speech have
been developed
The Divine Source

The basic • “ If infants were allowed to grow up

idea of the without hearing any language, then
they would spontaneously begin using
theory is the original God-given language.”
that :
 The Natural Sound Source

• primitive words derive from imitations of the natural sounds that

human heard around them .

1. The “Bow-Wow” Theory

human tried to imitate the sounds created in nature.
• These words are called onomatopoeia.
• it is hard to see how most of the soundless things (e.g. “low branch”) as well as
abstract concepts (e.g. “truth”) could have been referred to in a language that simply
echoed natural sounds.
• Furthermore, a language is only a set of words used as “names” for things.
 The Natural Sound Source

2. The “Pooh-Pooh” Theory

• Speech developed from the instinctive sounds people make in
emotional circumstances.
• he original sounds of language may have come from natural cries
of emotion such as pain, anger and joy
• such as Ah!, Ooh!, Phew!, Wow! or Yuck!
But:
These sounds are usually produced with sudden intakes of breath,
which is the opposite of ordinary talk.
 The Social Interaction Source

• the sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our
language,
• especially when that physical effort involved several people and the interaction had to be
coordinated.
• So, a group of early humans might develop a set of hums, grunts, groans and curses that
were used when they were lifting and carrying large bits of trees or lifeless hairy
mammoths.
 The Physical Adaptation Source

• Teeth and Lips primates and their resulting

• Human teeth are upright, they are flexibility certainly helps in making
roughly sounds like p, b and m.
even in height. They are also much • In fact, the b and m sounds are the
smaller. most widely attested in the
• They are also very helpful in vocalizations made by human
making sounds such as f or v. infants during their first year, no
matter which language their parents
• Human lips have much more
are using.
intricate muscle
interlacing than is found in other
 The Physical Adaptation Source

• Mouth and Tongue

The human mouth is relatively small compared to other primates
and can be opened and closed rapidly.
• humans have a shorter, thicker and more muscular tongue that can be used to
shape a wide variety of sounds inside the oral cavity.
• In addition, unlike other primates, humans can close off the airway through
the nose to create more air pressure in the mouth.
• capable of a wider range of shapes and a more rapid and powerful delivery
of sounds produced through these different shapes.
 The Physical Adaptation Source

• Larynx and Pharynx

• The human larynx or “voice box” (containing the vocal folds) differs significantly in
position from the larynx of other primates such as monkeys.
• pharynx, above the vocal folds, which acts as a resonator for increased
range and clarity of the sounds produced via the larynx.
 The Tool-Making Source

• By about two million years ago, there is evidence that humans had
developed preferential right-handedness and had become capable of
making stone tools. Tool making, or the outcome of manipulating objects
and changing them using both hands, is evidence of a brain at
work
 The Human Brain

• Those functions that control the motor movements involved in

complex
vocalization (speaking) and object manipulation (making or using
tools) are very close to each other in the left hemisphere of the
brain.
• The patterns of blood flow to specific parts of the brain were very
similar,
• suggesting that aspects of the structure of language may have
developed through the same brain circuits established earlier for
 The Genetic Source

• human offspring are born with a special capacity for language.

• It is innate, no other creature seems to have it and it is not tied to a specific
variety of language.
The Innateness Hypothesis
• the idea that humans are genetically equipped to acquire language
some changes are believed to have enhanced blood flow in the brain,
creating the conditions for a bigger and more complex brain to develop.
• the discovery of one particular gene (FOXP2) that is thought to have a role in language production
 STUDY QUESTION
1 When did written language develop?
2 When can we say the human auditory system has begun working?
3 What percentage of human breathing while speaking normally consists of in-breaths?
4 What is the difference between the position of the larynx in humans and other primates?
5 Why are interjections such as Ooh! or Yuck! considered to be unlikely sources of human
speech sounds?
6 What is the basic idea behind the “bow-wow” theory of language origin?
 STUDY QUESTION
7 Why is it difficult to agree with Psammetichus that Phrygian must have been the original human
language?
8 Where is the pharynx and how did it become an important part of human sound
production?
9 Why do you think that young deaf children who become fluent in sign language would be cited in
support of the innateness hypothesis?
10 With which of the six “sources” would you associate the following quotation?

Chewing, licking and sucking are extremely widespread mammalian activities, which,
in terms of casual observation, have obvious similarities with speech.
Animals and Human Language
ANIMALS AND HUMAN LANGUAGE

• informative signals:
behavior that provides information, usually unintentionally
•
communicative signals:
behavior used intentionally to provide information
PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE

1. Reflexivity 5. Cultural Transmission

2. Displacement, 6. Duality

3. Arbitrariness,

4. Productivity,
REFLEXIVITY

• a special property of human language that allows language to be used to think

and talk about language itself.

• e.g. I wish he wouldn’t use so many technical terms

DISPLACEMENT

• Animal communication seems to be designed exclusively for the here and now.
It isn’t used to relate events that are removed in time and place.
Humans can refer to past and future time.
• This property of human language is called displacement.
• It allows language users to talk about things not present in the immediate
environment.
ARBITRARINESS

• there is no “natural” connection between a linguistic form and its meaning.

• For the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be a clear connection
between the conveyed message and the signal used to convey it.
• The linguistic form has no natural or “iconic” relationship with that hairy four-
legged barking object out in the world.
CULTURAL TRANSMISSION

• We acquire a language in a culture with other speakers and not from parental genes.
• This process whereby a language is passed on from one generation to the next is described
as cultural transmission.
• we are not born with the ability to produce utterances in a specific language such as
English. We acquire our first language as children in a culture.
• The general pattern in animal communication is that creatures are born with a set of
specific signals that are produced instinctively.
PRODUCTIVITY

• Humans are continually creating new expressions by manipulating their

linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations.

• This lack of productivity in animal communication can be described in terms of

fixed reference.
DUALITY

• Human language is organized at two levels simultaneously.

• with a limited set of sounds, we are capable of producing a very large number
of sound combinations (e.g. words) that are distinct in meaning.

• Among other creatures, each communicative signal appears to be a single fixed

form that cannot be broken down into separate parts.
PHONOLOGY

• Phonology is the description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds in a language.
• phonology is concerned with the abstract or mental aspect of the sounds in language
rather than with the actual physical articulation of speech sounds.
PHONEMES

• A phoneme one of these meaning-distinguishing sounds in a language is described as.

• An essential property of a phoneme is that it functions contrastively.
• If we change one sound in a word and there is a change of meaning, the sounds are
distinct phonemes.
NATURAL CLASSES

• Phonemes that have certain features in common tend to behave phonologically in some
similar ways.
• Because these two sounds share some features, they are sometimes described as members
of a natural class of phonemes.

/p/ /k/ /v/ /n/

-voice -voice +voice +voice
+bilabial +velar +labiodental +alveolar
+stop +stop + fricative +nasal
PHONES AND ALLOPHONES

• allophones is different versions of phones.

• The [t] sound in the word tar is normally pronounced with a stronger puff of air than is
present in the [t] sound in the word star.
Phoneme Allophones
/t/
[th] (tar)
[ɾ] (writer)
[ʔ] (butter)
[t̪] (eighth)
MINIMAL PAIRS AND SETS

• Phonemic distinctions in a language can be tested via pairs and sets of words.
• When two words such as fan and van are identical in form except for a contrast in one
phoneme,
occurring in the same position, the two words are described as a minimal pair.
Minimal pairs Minimal sets
fan – van bath – math big – pig – rig – fig – dig – wig
bat –beat math – myth fat – f it – feet –fete – foot – fought
sit –sing myth –Mick cat –can – cap – cab – cash – cadge
PHONOTACTICS
WORD FORMATION
NEOLOGISMS :A NEW WORD

• The study of the origin and history of a word is known as its etymology

• constant evolution of new words and new uses of old words as a reassuring sign
of vitality and creativeness in the way a language is shaped by the needs of its
users.
WORD FORMATION
• Borrowing
taking over of words from other languages.
dope (Dutch) piano (Italian) tattoo (Tahitian)
jewel (French) pretzel (German) tycoon (Japanese)
• Loan-translation (calque )
In this process, there is a direct translation of the elements of a word into the
borrowing language.
the English word superman is thought to be a loan-translation of the German
Übermensch,
WORD FORMATION

• Compounding
joining of two separate words to produce a single form.
E.g. bookcase, doorknob, fingerprint, sunburn
• Blending
special compounding-take only the beginning of one word and join it to the end of the
other word.
• e.g. bit (binary/digit), brunch (breakfast/lunch), motel (motor/hotel),
WORD FORMATION

• Clipping
This occurs when a word of more than one syllable (facsimile) is reduced to a shorter form
fax.
e.g .ad (advertisement), flu (influenza) , cab (cabriolet),
• Hypocorisms
In this process, a longer word is reduced to a single syllable, then -y or -ie is added to the
end.
e.g. movie (“moving pictures”) and telly (“television”)
• Backformation
 Grammar

• the analysis of the structure of phrases and sentences.

• traditional grammar, is the description of Latin and Greek.

 The Parts of Speech

• Analyze the following sentences

• Each part of speech, or word class, is illustrated in
the following sentence and simple
definitions of each technical term are listed below.
•
The lucky boys found a backpack in

the park and they opened it carefully

 Agreement

• the grammatical connection between two parts of a sentence, as in the connection

between a subject (Cathy) and the form of a verb (loves chocolate)
• This agreement is partially based on the category of number
• It is also based on the category of person.
• another category called tense.
• It is also related to the voice of the sentences.
• final category is gender, which helps us describe the agreement between Cathy and
her in our example sentence.
 Grammatical Gender

• natural gender is based on sex (male and female), grammatical gender is based on
the type of noun (masculine and feminine) and is not tied to sex.
Spanish, for example, has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine,
• as in the expressions el sol (“the sun”) and la luna (“the moon”).
• German uses three genders, masculine der Mond (“the moon”), feminine die Sonne
(“the sun”) and neuter das Feuer
(“the fire”).
• We should emphasize that this gender distinction is not based on a distinction in sex.
• A young girl is biologically female, but the German noun das Mädchen used to talk about
her is grammatically neuter. The French noun in le livre (“the book”) is grammatically
masculine, but neither we nor the French people consider a book to be biologically male.
 The Prescriptive Approach

• an approach to grammar that has rules for the proper use of the language,
traditionally based on Latin grammar.
• Some old-style prescriptive rules for English are:

You must not split an infinitive

You must not end a sentence with a preposition
 The Descriptive Approach

• an approach to grammar that is based on a description of the structures actually

used in a language, not what should be used, in contrast to the prescriptive
approach
• attempted to describe regular structures of that language as it was used, not
according to some view of how it should be used.
 Structural Analysis

• investigate the distribution of forms in a language.

• The method involves the use of “testframes,” which can be sentences with empty slots in
them.

The _______________ makes a lot of noise.

I heard a _______________ yesterday.

because all these forms fit in the same test-frame, they are likely to be examples of the same
grammatical category, a “noun” (or N).
 Constituent Analysis

• a grammatical analysis of how small constituents (or components) go together to form

larger constituents in sentences
 Subjects and Objects

• the terms “subject” and “object” to describe the different functions of noun phrases in a
sentence.
• the subject as the first noun phrase before the verb and the object as the noun phrase after
the verb.
• adjunct, often a prepositional phrase, which typically provides additional information such
as where, when or how the subject verb-ed the object
SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS

• the subject is the person or thing that the sentence is about and often the one that performs the action of the
verb,
• the object more typically represents the person or thing that undergoes the action.
• The subject noun phrase determines the form of the verb as singular or plural
 Word Order

• the linear order of constituents in a sentence

The English word order is SVO
• The most common pattern is actually Subject–Object–Verb (SOV)
(SVO) Subject Verb Object
NP V NP
English John saw the big dog
(SOV) Subject Object Verb
“John” “big dog” “saw”
Persian ‫ان‬S‫ج‬ ‫زرگرا‬SSS‫گب‬S ‫س‬ ‫دید‬