Sociolinguistics
from www.unc.edu
Until this point, we have essentially been considering language as a formal system that can be profitably studied independently from the people who use it. This type of approach is often referred to in the field as the are of "formal" linguistics. People use the term "formal" because such investigation revolves around constructing formal models that allow us to understand how various subparts or modules of the linguistic grammar function. These subparts or modules consist of the areas that we have been studying all semester, such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
There is, however, a lot more to understanding language than focusing on these core theoretical areas. If we can gain insight into how language works by studying its formal grammatical properties, we must also realize that language as a "thing" to be studied is necessarily a kind of simplification, because language isn't a "thing" external to human beings, but rather, something that makes up a part of who we are.
What I want to stress here is that language must also be profitably studied in its social context. In so doing, we learn both about language and about ourselves, the people who use it, live with it, and live in it. Sociolinguistics, then, as the name implies, is the study of language in human society. We'll focus here on a major aspect of sociolinguistic research in the past decades, an area generally referred to as language variation. As its own name implies, language variation focuses on how language varies in different contexts, where context refers to things like ethnicity, social class, sex, geography, age, and a number of other factors.
Language Variation
Before we review various aspects of language variation in more detail, I want to make sure we've got some basic terms and concepts down. So, here goes...
SOME IMPORTANT TERMINOLOGY
Internal Variation: the property of languages having different ways of expressing the same meaning. Importantly, this refers to within language, not across language, differences. An example of internal variation in English is "ask" vs. "aks".
Language variety: This is a general term that may be used at a number of levels. So, we can use the term to distinguish between English and French, but we can also use the term to distinguish between two varieties of English, such as New York City English vs. Appalachian English.
Dialect: This is a complex and often misunderstood concept. For linguists, a dialect is the collection of attributes (phonetic, phonological, syntactic, morphological, semantic) that make one group of speakers noticeably different from another group of speakers of the same language.
COMMON SOURCES OF MISUNDERSTANDING
1) DIALECT is NOT a negative term for linguists. . Often times, for example, we hear people refer to non-standard varieties of English as "dialects", usually to say something bad about the non-standard variety (and thus about the people who speak it). This happened quite a bit during last year's ebonics controversy. But, the term dialect refers to ANY variety of a language. Thus, by definition, we all speak a dialect of our native language.
2) DIALECT is NOT synonymous with accent. Accent is only a part of dialectal variation. Non-linguists often think accents define a dialect (or that accents alone identify people as non-native or foreign language speakers). Also, non-linguists tend to think that it's always the "other" people that have "an accent". So, what is "accent"?
3) ACCENT: This term refers to phonological variation, i.e. variation in pronunciation Thus, if we talk about a Southern Accent, we're talking about a generalized property of English pronunciation in the Southern part of the US. But, Southern dialects have more than particular phonological properties. Accent is thus about pronunciation, while dialect is a broader term encompassing syntactic, morphological, and semantic properties as well.
A final note on accent. WE ALL HAVE ONE! There is no such thing as a person who speaks without an accent. This is not an exercise in political correctness, by the way. It is a fact.
In sum, a dialect is a particular variety of a language, and we all have a dialect. Accent refers to the phonology of a given dialect. Since we all have a dialect, we all have an accent.
Idiolect: Another term that we must be familiar with is idiolect. "What's an idiolect?" you ask, on the edge of your seat. An idiolect is simply the technical term we use to refer to the variety of language spoken by each individual speaker of the language. Just as there is variation among groups of speakers of a language, there is variation from speaker to speaker. No two speakers of a language speak identically. Each speaks her or his own particular variety of that language. Each thus speaks her or his own idiolect.
A Snapshot of "The Big Picture":
* A language, say English, is really a collection of dialects.
* A dialect is a particular variety of a language that differs noticeably from the variety or varieties of the same language spoken by another group or groups of people.
* Dialects themselves are collections of idiolects (and thus so are languages).
Some Issues that complicate the "Big Picture" a bit
While the big picture is relatively simple, the world is a fuzzy and complex place. How do we know where one dialect begins and another ends? How do we even know if two language varieties are dialects of the same language or are dialects of different languages altogether? Let's set aside the first question for a moment, and address the second.
Linguists use a particular criterion to address the issue of how to determine whether two dialects are varieties of the same language or not. What we use is the criterion of mutual intelligibility. That is, if speakers of the two dialects can converse fluently with one another, although they recognize themselves to be speaking different varieties of the language, then we are looking at two dialects of the same language.
Many of you are speakers of "Southern" English (I use quotes because it is actually a BIG oversimplification to treat "Southern English" as a monolithic dialect), while I speak something akin to so-called standard English. (Though I grew up in the New York City metropolitan area, I do not have many of the linguistic properties in my dialect that are usually associated with that region.) Anyway, you can understand me in lecture, and I can understand you when you ask questions or come to talk to me in office hour. The point, to belabor the obvious, is that such communication is possible because although we may speak different dialects of English, the differences are not so great as to prevent us from understanding one another.
Regarding the issue of different languages, clearly there are cases where no one is going to wonder whether two speakers are speaking dialects of one language or whether they are speakers of different languages. So, if I come in and lecture to you in Spanish, I doubt that you'll scratch your heads and say, "Gee, is this a variety of English or is it something else?" But, there are many situations where the dividing line is far less clear.
There are a number of reasons why things get tricky, both linguistic and non-linguistic. A major linguistic complication comes in the form of what we call a dialect continuum. This is a situation in which there are a number of contiguous dialects that are closely related but that are not all mutually intelligible.
What's a dialect continuum?
To simplify somewhat, think of it this way. Imagine we've got ten dialects (1-10) in a row:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Now, imagine that each dialect is highly similar to its immediately adjacent neighbors, but that as we move farther away the similarities become fewer and fewer. So, 1 is very similar to 2, less similar to 3, even less similar to 4, and by the time we get to 8, 9 or 10, 1 is no longer mutually intelligible with these. By the criterion of mutual intelligibility, we'd want to thus say that 1 and 10 belong to different languages. That's fine. But what do we do about 5, which may be mutually intelligible with both 1 and 10? Which language does 5 belong to? How many different languages are we talking about here?
An example of the dialect continuum problem
An interesting example that I have first hand experience with is the case of the Mixtec languages in Mexico. There are roughly 300,000 Mixtec speakers in Mexico, primarily spread out in the state of Oaxaca. Mixtec is an indigenous language that is a member of a larger family called the Otomanguean language family. But, Mixtec itself is actually composed of a number of mutually unintelligible dialects. Estimates of how many such dialects there are vary, but a fairly trustworthy study puts the number at 22. Perhaps more meaningful than the number 22, however, is the observation that mutual intelligibility among Mixtecs is best measured in terms of walking distance. Specifically, it has been reported that the geographical extension of mutual intelligibility is roughly the equivalent of two days walking from any given Mixtec village. (Mixtecs, as I've told you, are incredibly hearty walkers in general!) This is a clear case of a dialect continuum similar to our case of 1-10 above, except that all the Mixtecs obviously aren't all lined up in a row.
In fact, what more sophisticated studies of mutual intelligibility try to do is quantify in some fashion over the issue of intelligibility. That is, rather than take mutual intelligibility to be an all or nothing issue, they try to break the issue down into percentages so that we might be able to distinguish between degrees of intelligibility. As a case in point, the particular variety of Mixtec that I have worked on is among the most isolated, and has been reported to only have a 25% intelligibility level with the closest dialect to it.
What you should take away from this discussion is that while the criterion of mutual intelligibility is a good and useful criterion for determining whether two varieties of a language are dialects of the same language or not, dialects often form a continuum which makes finding an exact dividing point between languages quite difficult, if not downright impossible.
Nonlinguistic Factors and the dialect vs. language issue
Non-linguistic factors also often complicate matters further. A famous linguists once said, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." What he was calling attention to were the political factors involved in how people determine just what a language is. A good, though very depressing, example of this can be found in the former Yugoslavia. The majority language in the former Yugoslavia was called Serbo-Croatian. This language was spoken throughout the country (Albanian and Macedonian, for example, were also spoken in parts of Yugoslavia, so Serbo-Croatian wasn't the only language.) Anyway, now that Croatia has broken off into its own independent state, the language of Croatia is officially Croatian, and the language now spoken in what is still called Yugoslavia is officially called Serbian. These are now officially two completely different languages, due to the fact that there is a political border between Croatia and Serbia.
From the point of view of the linguist, of course, they are still a single language, and the differences between them are examples of dialectal variation on a par with, say, New York vs. Boston English. But, the animosity between Serbs and Croats makes them refuse to admit that they are speaking the same language (even though they know they are and can, of course, understand one another!).
An example of politics working in the other direction is the case of China. There are quite a few languages spoken in China, but the Chinese government refers to them all as dialects of Chinese. Two of these so-called dialects are Cantonese and Mandarin. Cantonese is spoken in part of Southern China (it's spoken in Shanghai), while Mandarin is spoken in the north (it's the language spoken in Beijing). Though these two languages are both historically related, they are NOT mutually intelligible. Yet the Chinese refer to them as dialects of a single language as a means of enforcing a vision of cultural and political unity. Imagine if the Europeans decided that they were all going to call Spanish, French, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Provencal dialects of a single language, Romance, and you start to get the picture. Or imagine that we decide that English, Dutch, and German are all dialects of a single German language. Yes, these languages ARE historically related, but from the point of view of the linguist, their non-mutual intelligibility makes them different languages, not dialects of a single present day language.
Speech Communities
Okay, if we've got a pretty clear idea of what a dialect is, then the idea of a speech community is fairly straightforward.
* A speech community is a group of people who speak a common dialect.
Linguists working on language variation often characterize speech communities in terms of extra-linguistic factors, i.e. along ethnic or geographical lines. While this can be useful and can shed light on the hows and whys of dialect variation, it is important to note that the linguists who do this KNOW that there is really no such thing as a pure dialect spoken only by a particular ethnic group or by people from just one perfectly definable region. In large part, people are in contact with one another and with many varieties of a language.
For example, your book Language Files gives you an example of speech from an older man with many well known characteristics of Appalachian English:
1) I used to could read. (double modal)
2) I ain't no girl now. (multiple negation)
3) He has a broken back ____ was never set. ("that" deletion)
4) Put some bakin' sody on it. (sody instead of soda)
5) I fell upside of the building. (lexical substitution--upside of for against the side of)
What they point out, though, is that the speaker is a native of Southern Ohio, not actually a native of Appalachia. And his speech is affected by factors such as age, sex, and socio-economic status.
To cite another simple example, linguists study African American English (most recently called ebonics), but there is no assumption here that ALL African Americans speak this dialect. Nor is there an assumption that this dialect is limited to African Americans only. It does happen to be true, however, that most speakers of this dialect are African Americans.
So, big picture again. A dialect is a variety of a language. A speech community is the group of people who speak the dialect. What makes a particular group of people speak a particular dialect has to do with a number of factors which may play a more or less significant role in any particular case. These include socio-economic status, ethnicity, sex, and geographical location.
Kinds of Variation
Now we're ready to get down to particular aspects of language variation. Returning to our grammatical modules, we can see that carefully examining language variation requires both attention to grammar and attention to society. What do I mean by this? Simply, that if we identify a particular dialect, our understanding of how that dialect works requires an understanding of the phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of that dialect, as well as an understanding of who speaks it. So, here we'll cover grammatical aspects of language variation.
Phonetic Variation
Your textbook, Language Files, is actually a bit unclear regarding the difference between phonological and phonetic variation.
Though it doesn't come out and say so specifically, your book treats phonetic variation as variation in pronunciation that don't affect the phonemic level of the grammar. Two examples are provided. Here's the case of New York alveolar consonants.
In some New York City dialects, alveolar consonants are systematically produced with contact between the tongue tip and the upper teeth (i.e. they are dento-alveolar), while in so-called standard dialects, the alveolars are not dental. So, in New York English, the [t] word "two" is produced with contact between the tongue tip and the teeth. In so-called standard English, this isn't the case. Alveolar consonants are not always realized as dentals.
So, why is this a case of phonetic variation? The answer is basically this. At the phonemic level, there is really no difference between NY English and standard English. Both have the exact same set of alveolar consonant PHONEMES. What's different is that the place of articulation differs ever so slightly between the two dialects. NY English speakers always produce their alveolar consonants with contact between the tongue tip and the upper front teeth. Standard English speakers only do this sometimes, as in words like [tenth].
In short, the difference is not found at the phoneme level but rather at the allophone level. This is what your book is referring to by this example of phonetic variation between NY English and standard American English.
Phonological Variation
Now let's turn to the case of phonological variation. This situation is a little different. Here, the variation in pronunciation represents variation at the level of the phoneme or at the level of phonotactic constraints on things like syllable shape. How so? The book gives a few useful examples. Here's one:
* I have a difference in my dialect between the vowel in the word "caught" and the vowel in the word "cot". For me, these are a minimal pair. The first, "caught" has a lax, mid, rounded, back vowel (its phonetic symbol is a backwards "c"), while the latter is the low, back, unrounded vowel [a]. In a few dialects of American English, this difference has been neutralized, aka lost. That is, these two different phonemes have merged. Specifically, people who speak these dialects pronounce the vowel in "caught" as an [a]: [kat], thus rendering the two words "caught" and "cot" homophonous.
Why is this a case of phonological and not phonetic variation? Because, the result of this kind of variation is the loss of a phonological contrast. Whereas in my dialect these vowels are allophones of two different phonemes, the dialects that don't have this difference have lost a contrast. Another way of putting this is to say that the dialect that has lost the backwards "c" vowel that I still have in my dialect, has one less vowel phoneme than my dialect has. What's most important here is that we understand that the difference is relevant at the level of the phoneme. This is what your book classifies as an example of phonological variation.
So, the big picture is that the variation means that the phoneme system is different in the two varieties. In the case of NY alveolars above, the allophones of the alveolar consonant phonemes are different, but both dialects still have the same alveolar phonemes in the same words. Here's another interesting example:
* In some African American dialects, the sequences Cr and Cl (C stands for consonant) are prohibited in unstressed syllables. So, "professor" is "pofessor". This is a case of phonological variation because in SAE, the word professor has an /r/ as the second phoneme of the word, but in AAE, /r/ is simply not allowed to appear in this position.
This is a case of phonological variation because we are able to identify a particular difference in phonotactics between AAE and SAE. AAE doesn't allow Cl and Cr clusters, while SAE does. This literally means that there is a significant difference in the phonological rules of the two dialects Specifically, the inventory of possible syllable types differs from one to the other.
Morphological Variation
Examples of morphological variation should be fairly easy for you to identify. Your book notes the case of northern England and Southern Wales, where the -s suffix is used as a general present tense marker. In many other dialects of English, -s is reserved for marking the present tense in third person singular forms only.
I likes him.
We walks all the time.
Another example comes from Appalachian English, which has a number of past tense forms that are non-standard. "Et" for "ate", "hEt" for "heated". These are all examples of morphological variation.
Syntactic Variation
As the name suggests, syntactic variation involves syntactic differences among dialects. Keeping close to home, it is common in many Southern dialects to find the word "done" used as an auxiliary, as in "she done already told you" or "I done finished a while ago." In SAE, this isn't the case. And, in fact, many times people who want to imitate Southern American English speech often pick up on this rather salient property.
Double modals (combinations of auxiliaries) are also common across parts of the South. Examples are: "I might could do it" or "They useta could do it" or "He might would if you asked him nice enough."
These are examples of syntactic variation. Another famous example is the use of so-called double negatives, as in "I didn't see nobody."
Semantic Variation
Often times, what people studying variation talk about when they discuss semantic variation is the different meanings that particular words have from dialect to dialect, or the different words that are used for the same thing in different dialects. We might more accurately refer to this as the study of lexical semantic variation. That's a fancy way of saying that we are studying variation in the meanings of words.
So, an example of a single word meaning different things is the compound "knocked up". In England it means 'rouse from sleep'. Here in the States it means "to make pregnant".
Examples of different words being used for the same thing also abound. I remember when I first went to college that someone asked me if I liked frappes. I literally had no idea what he was talking about. It turns out that frappe is a common term for "milk shake" in New England. Obviously, it wasn't a common term in the New York area that I was from.
Other examples are words like "soda". For me, this is a general term for soft drink. For speakers of other dialects, "soda" may mean seltzer water or club soda only. In some of these dialects, the general term for soft drink is "pop". In yet other dialects, the general term is "coke", while for me, "coke" refers to only a specific brand of cola.
By the way, when you go to the store, what do you get your groceries in? A bag or a sack? In my dialect, it's a bag. But when I lived in Montana, I quickly learned that you get your groceries there in a sack.
Language and Socioeconomic Status
One of the most persistent and pernicious misunderstandings of the concept dialect revolves around the problem of standard vs. nonstandard varieties of a language. Before I discuss this problem in a bit more detail, let's make sure the big picture is clear. Specifically, let's break the problem down into two categories: the WRONG view, and the RIGHT view. (I know, I know, I'm being absolutist here. But the point is important to make, and this issue is important to address, so why not be direct about it.)
THE WRONG VIEW
# A language is composed of a "standard" dialect from which all of the other non-standard dialects emerge.
# The standard dialect is the "correct" way to speak the language.
# The other dialects represent erroneous or inferior ways of speaking the language.
# The non-standard language is more complex, more logical, more expressive than the non-standard dialects.
# Non-standard dialects are a product of "lazy" speech.
THE RIGHT VIEW
* Languages have various dialects.
* There are actually a range of varieties that people consider to be standard. So, Bill Clinton speaks the "standard" and so do I, but my dialect is clearly NOT the same as Clinton's.
* What is considered standard is associated with prestige, a non-linguistic factor.
* From a linguistic standpoint, what is considered standard has NOTHING to do with correctness or superiority.
* From a linguistic standpoint, ALL DIALECTS are equally correct, equally expressive, equally complex, equally logical and so forth. That is, the term non-standard dialect means just that, not the standard dialect. It DOES NOT MEAN inferior or sub-standard.
* Non-standard dialects are not simply offshoots from the standard. That is, don't think of non-standard dialects simply as daughters of some standard variety. This is important, because when we compare non-standard and standard dialects people tend to think that the properties of the non-standard have evolved out of the standard. This is not the case. Non-standard and standard dialects taken together simply make up the range of dialects that constitute a language.
Okay, I've given you the wrong and the right views. But this isn't sufficient, because I don't want you to believe these things simply because I say so. Rather, I want you to understand why the evidence overwhelmingly supports what I've told you.
Evidence for the RIGHT VIEW
What kinds of evidence might we look for to support these claims? Here are some ideas:
* If there is a correct way to speak a language, and that correct way is reflected in the standard, then we predict that through time the standard will be unchanging with respect to this "right" way of doing things.
But, time and time again, we see that this is simply not the case. Language Files provides a simple example regarding multiple negation. In current standard American English, multiple negation structures are non-standard and people who use them are often ridiculed, e.g. "I don't want no help". We saw an example of this in the video that we watched in class. An upper class Southern woman ridiculed what she referred to as uneducated speech by imitating one speaker's use of multiple negation (something about "not running into no stump and not wanting to make no hole in the bottom of a boat").
In fact, some particularly pedantic types argue that two negatives actually cancel each other out logically. As a consequence, they suggest that anyone who says "I don't want no help" is actually requesting aid. Clearly, there is often an attempt to demean speakers who use double or other multiple negative constructions.
Well, let's be pedantic ourselves, just for fun, by pointing out that in Chaucer's time, multiple negation WAS the norm. Language Files quotes a passage from the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales:
He never yet no villany not said
In all his life to no kind of creature
By my count, there are FOUR (count 'em) negations in this sentence: "never" , "no", "not", and "no". According to the rules of logic, since this is an even number of negations, I suppose a paraphrase should have them all canceling each other out, so the passage should mean something like: "He always said bad things to all creatures". Of course, we KNOW that it doesn't mean that. Even with its four negations, we have a clear sense that it means that "He never said anything bad to anyone".
So, in our time, multiple negation is non-standard. Big deal. In Chaucer's time, it was standard. In fact, multiple negation is highly common across languages the world over. All that stuff about multiple negations canceling each other out is basically bunk. Sure, we can use multiple negation to this effect, but intonation plays a big role when we do so. So, I can say, "I didn't say I saw nobody" to suggest that I did see somebody. But note that if you do this, your intonation is not that of a normal declarative. In fact, you put extra emphasis on the word "nobody" so as to call the listener's attention to the fact that you are playing with the double negative. Essentially, you are being coy.
Anyway, the bottom line here is that there is nothing inherently more or less correct about multiple negation. Thus, whether it is standard or not in contemporary English has nothing to do with correctness or logical purity. It has to do with factors that are non-linguistic. Specifically, our objections to multiple negation tell us more about our attitudes towards the people who use it than about the adequacy or inadequacy of multiple negation itself.
What other kinds of things should be true if the views above are correct?
* Well, if we're right, we might expect to find cases of language change in progress that show how arbitrary the notions of standard are.
Here is a nice example that shows just this point. In contemporary American English, we have a couple of changes that are presently taking place. Both involve "misuse" of pronouns. Note that I put quotes around "misuse" to point out that both involve uses that depart from the traditional prescriptive standard. Interestingly, one of these is generally accepted, while the other is considered "incorrect". Here is an example of each:
* John and me went bowling last Friday night.
* Mary gave the books to John and I.
Does one of these seem somehow "worse" to you. My intuition, at least, is that the first one sounds worse than the second one. In fact, according to old time grammar rules, both are equally wrong. Each involves a misuse of a pronoun. "Me", as an object pronoun, is should not be used as a subject. In the second case, "I", as a subject pronoun, should not be used as the object of the verb "gave". If both are equally wrong, why does the second one not sound as wrong as the first (if this is the case for you)? One explanation is that highly educated people say the second one all the time, but tend not to say the first one as often. It's not the case that either one is actually better (or worse). They both reflect ongoing changes in how we use pronouns in English. As an aside, it is perhaps not surprising that such changes should happen. The pronoun system is a relic of a case system that has been lost in the rest of the language, so losing the old case driven uses of the pronouns isn't shocking. But, what is important here, is that our judgments about which of the two sentences sounds better or more standard may have more to do with the speakers than what's actually said.
Here's another example of the arbitrariness of what constitutes the standard.
An even more glaring example can be found in the Spanish spoken in Spain. In so-called standard peninsular Spanish, there's a phonemic difference between the voiceless interdental ("th") sound and [s], so we find pairs of words like: casa (pronounced kasa) and caza (pronounced katha). All over the Americas, this difference has been lost, and both words are pronounced the same, with an [s] and not a [th]. Both varieties are considered "standard" or "acceptable" by the Spanish Royal Academy. In parts of Spain, however, there is another dialect spoken in the southern part of the country in which both words are also pronounced the same. In this case, however, both are pronounced as [katha]. In this dialect, rather than all cases of [th] in the standard being realized as [s], all interdental fricatives and [s] are realized as [th]. I hope you can see that essentially the same process has occurred from a phonological point of view. In one dialect (or set of dialects), there is no /th/ phoneme, only /s/. In another, there is no /s/ phoneme, only the interdental /th/. BUT, only one of the dialects is accepted as falling into the standard. The southern dialect is considered "unacceptable" by the royal academy and is frequently ridiculed. Why? Well, the people who speak the "unacceptable" dialect are largely poor and uneducated. Again, the message, it's not what is said, it's who says it! There is NOTHING inherently better about either dialect. In fact, it is only attitudes towards speakers that result in one falling into the sphere of acceptable varieties while the other remains outside.
Let's provide another argument along these lines.
* If we are right above then we should expect to see the very same linguistic features be standard in one place but non-standard in another.
This is, in fact, simple to show. English, as we all know, has an American Standard and a British standard. In American English, "r" dropping is considered non-standard. Think about all the "r" dropping you saw in the video of the non-prestige dialect speakers from Boston. Stereotypical New Yorkese also has "r" dropping as a feature and "r" dropping is often taken as a sign of lack of education and social status. By contrast, in standard British English, "r" dropping is a prestige feature. Imitate a Brit saying "bird" or the word "car" and you'll see that the [r] is dropped. So, here you have "r" dropping as a marker of non-standard American English but standard British English. This should be surprising to anyone who thinks that what is found in the standard is inherently better. It should come as no surprise to someone who thinks that the linguistic differences between standard and non-standard dialects are simply that, differences.
One more point here:
* If we are correct in our RIGHT VIEW /WRONG VIEW statements above, then we should expect that today's standard might be tomorrow's non-standard.
And this happens all the time. I've already discussed above the example of multiple negation in Middle English, but closer to home, it is useful to remember that "r" drop in New York English was a marker of prestige around the turn of the last century. Now, it marks the opposite. What gives? People. What is standard is not a matter of "better" from a linguistic point of view. What is standard is dictated by attitudes in the society towards particular groups of people who speak in particular ways.
Big Picture Time Again
Once we recognize the arbitrary nature of what constitutes a standard variety of a language, it is simply impossible to maintain that any dialect is "superior" to any other. Different? Yes. Better? Worse? Never.
Prestige
If what makes a language standard or non-standard is not a linguistic issue, what is the difference? Of course, the reality of the situation is that the situation is VERY complex. There are many factors that come into play. But, it is important to note that dialects are intimately related to the notion of prestige within a society. Basically, the standard dialect is the dialect that is associated with prestige in the society at large. Does this mean that all prestigious people MUST speak the standard? No. But an overwhelming number do. That's why we have no trouble associating the standard with prestige. (Just what constitutes prestige is bundled up in a number of issues that are beyond the scope of this review sheet!)
This raises an apparently simple question. If the standard confers prestige on its speakers, why doesn't everyone just learn the standard? Well, what looks simple isn't always so simple. One thing is this. The question assumes that everyone is WELCOME to speak the standard. As the case of NY "r" dropping might suggest, when lots of people in NY starting dropping their r's, the prestige group put their "r's" back in. And, if we know anything about dialects at this point, we should know that people's attitudes towards dialects tells us more about their attitudes towards the speakers of those dialects.
Also, think about how you feel about your own dialect. Even if you speak a non-standard variety, do you want to be told by someone else that the way you speak is "wrong" or inadequate and that YOU should change? Dialects are intimately wound up with identity and with a sense of community. It is not realistic to pretend that this is not the case and that people can simply shrug off one dialect and adopt another with no cost. In fact, once you are an adult, learning the speech patterns of another dialect may even require a lot of training. It is important to realize that there are prestige factors, within group prestige factors, involved in non-standard dialects. Even though a speaker may speak a non-standard variety of a language, she or he may gain prestige within her or his dialect community by using the non-standard variety.
This thus brings us to two concepts:
* Overt Prestige: This refers to speakers of non-standard varieties who adopt (to some degree) the standard variety. We use the term Overt Prestige to indicate that the speaker is seeking to associate her or himself with the general prestigious dialect within a society.
* Covert Prestige: This refers to speakers who choose not to adopt a standard dialect. We use the term Covert Prestige because the prestige associated with this choice is that gained from within group social identification.
So, in simple terms, overt prestige is about seeking prestige by assimilating to the standard, while covert prestige is about not choosing to assimilate to the standard. Clearly, either choice has a distinct set of costs and benefits.
A final note on the prestige question. Many speakers of non-standard dialects are bidialectal. What does this mean? Basically, that they control both their own non-standard dialect and are fluent (to a greater or lesser extent) in a standard variety. This isn't surprising and is an obvious and logical strategy for pursuing the rewards of adopting the standard without losing the sense of group identity that is intimately related to the non-standard dialect.
Ways of classifying dialects
Okay, so we've seen that there are standard and non-standard dialects. I've tried to argue that this distinction isn't about the linguistic properties of the dialects in question, but rather, about sociological factors. In a society, standard dialects can also be called prestige dialects. By prestige, we mean that these dialects are not stigmatized in the society in which they are spoken.
When attempting to characterize more precisely particular dialects, linguists conduct their research along a number of lines. I'll review here the three major sources of language variation that we mentioned in class. These are: geography, ethnicity, and social class.
Geography
A major factor in dialect diversity is geography. The study of regional dialects is called dialectology. In File 10.4 of Language Files there is a nice discussion of regional dialect variation in the US, so I won't regurgitate this here. It is important to note that classifying regional variation proceeds similarly to work in historical linguistics. Your book mentions things called isoglosses. What are these? They are geographical areas that exhibit shared dialectal features. In the review notes for historical linguistics, I cited you the examples of isoglosses for Balto-Slavic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian. People use isoglosses in dialect research, for example, to mark the regions where people say bucket instead of pail, or soda instead of pop, or drop their r's, or monopthonize their diphthongs. This results in general shared dialect properties that run along certain geographical lines. Of course, the lines are never perfectly clear, but in broad strokes, we can get a nice sense of how dialect varies with geography.
Ethnicity
Another factor driving language variation is ethnicity. Often, ethnicity is also closely tied to a particular geographical area, as is the case with the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch that we saw on the video in class. Other times, ethnicity is a factor despite geographical dispersion, as is the case of African American Vernacular English (AAVE or Ebonics). Linguists have long noted that there are many shared characteristics in African American English, regardless of whether speakers live in the South, the Northeast, or the far West. This is most likely due to the recent migration of many African Americans from the South in the early part of the 20th Century, which in historical terms is only yesterday.
Your book provides a nice general sketch of AAVE in File 10.5. One controversy surrounding AAVE is its origins, which are in broad strokes broken down into the dialectologist view and the Creolist view. The former maintains that AAVE is essentially originally a regional variety of English spoken by a particular ethnic group that for obvious historical reasons was originally concentrated in the South and which underwent a great migration from the South. The Creolist view maintains that AAVE emerged as a Creole from pidgins used by slaves who spoke different African languages and that this Creole underwent a process of decreolization after increased contact with English.
Here's my two cents. Let me start by saying that I am not an expert in this area. So, I can't really judge which is the better account. Many people have argued (loudly) on both sides of the debate. From my point of view, though, I'm not convinced that either answer much matters at this point. I'm much more interested in making sure that we recognize that no matter what its historical origins, AAVE is a dialect of English that is every bit as "complete" as any other dialect of the language. This may seem obvious given what I've said above, but it certainly didn't seem obvious to the people screaming in the newspapers, on the radio, and on tv last year during the ebonics controversy. What your book does a nice job of is presenting a sketch of the structural features of AAVE (pp. 322-324), simply to highlight its highly regular, rule governed nature. Review these. (HINT)
Class
A third major factor in language variation is social class (the term class almost feels quaint in these post-Marxist times! But, heck, it's useful enough to get the job done here). Often times, it is important to bear in mind that class plays a role in dialects. Remember the case from the video of the Boston Brahmin dialect, or the reference by an upper class Southern woman to the "poor white trash" dialect also spoken in the South.
Regarding class, you should all review File 10.7, especially William Labov's study of R-lessness in New York City. What did Labov's experiment show? Well, he showed that people, especially middle class people, exhibit a large difference between whether they drop r's or produce them, depending on how unguarded their speech is. The more unguarded, the more they drop r's. The more guarded, the more r's they produced. Why? Labov concluded that class consciousness played a big role. In guarded moments, their class aspirations were visible. That is, they produce r's as a way of seeking the prestige of the r-ful dialect spoken by the upper class in NY. In unguarded moments, they don't produce as many r's because they are not trying to put on more prestigious airs. By contrast, the upper class group produced its r's regularly, in both careful and casual speech. Labov concluded that they were more comfortable with their class status as reflected in this aspect, at least, of their speech.
An Important Point
It's important to bear in mind that these factors are intermingled. The video we saw in class did a very nice job of illustrating this by filling the screen with a range of speakers from Boston. All spoke dialects identifiable as Boston English (a regional classification); they represented different ethnic sub-groups with distinct speech patterns within Boston English, and they clearly were differentiated along class (economic, education, etc.) lines. So, when we are looking at variation, we have to constantly bear all of these factors in mind as potential extra-linguistic factors. In fact, we also need to factor in such things as age and sex, which also play important roles in understanding language variation.
Speech Style
One more aspect of language variation that merits discussion is the notion of speech style. Frequently, speech style is confused with dialect. This happens for example with people who erroneously think "rap" is synonymous with African American English.
All people, regardless of what dialect they speak, control a range of speech styles. Depending on who we are talking to, and where we are, and so forth, we use different styles of speech. This is called style shifting. Think about how you talk to a) your friends, b) your parents, c) your professors. Do you use the same style with all three. I suspect not. If you are like me, maybe you are casual with your friends, more formal but still familiar with your parents, and most formal (sometimes you even feel stiff) with your professors (by the way, you don't need to be so formal...).
There are a number of dimensions along which we exhibit variation in speech style. These involve pronunciation, syntax, and vocabulary.
Pronunciation
One obvious area where speaking style shifts is how "carefully" we pronounce things. Specifically, we see that in "casual" speech, we often "drop" endings in words such as "hunting" which we might pronounce as something like "huntin". We see that we contract things, such as "watcha" for "what do you" and so forth.
Again, prescriptivists argue that this is evidence of laziness and so forth. At this point in the semester, I hope we are not fooled by such things. It's actually often evidence of efficiency and economy of speech gestures--like building a more fuel efficient car!!! Seriously, there's nothing wrong with such contractions. In fact, many contractions are necessary even in careful speech if we don't want our speech to sound ridiculously stupid. Imagine saying to your partner, "you love me, do you not?". Not real effective, I suspect.
My point: there is nothing inherently sloppy about fast speech pronunciation features. There are simply more and less appropriate times to use them.
Syntax
Style shifting also occurs in syntax. Here's a case in point. In the prescriptive standard, we are supposed to use "there are + plural noun" and "there is + singular noun". But, in more casual speech registers, people often say "there's three problems with your analysis". This is a case of syntactic style shifting. Another interesting example of syntactic style shifting is this. People often use more passive constructions when they want to sound more formal. Note how the first of the following sentences sounds more formal because it is in the passive:
* The use of antibiotics to treat bacterial infection is generally successful.
* If you use antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, you'll generally be successful.
This example also shows that the general prescriptive rule that we should never use passive constructions where active ones are possible is simply a lot of bunk. Sometimes passive constructions elevate your prose or speech to a necessarily more formal level.
Vocabulary
A major area of style shifting involves choice of vocabulary. We all know, for example, which words are "dirty" words in our language and when they are acceptable and when they are not acceptable to use. We also know which words are high-brow words that we use to impress people. In English, it is the case that we often use more Latinate words when we want to sound formal and impressive and intelligent. What sounds more impressive, for example, "divine" or "godly"? My intuition is that "divine" sounds more learned. Think about differences like "there are many factors" as opposed to "there are multiple factors". See how "multiple" makes the phrase sound fancier? We also have words that we know constitute the technical jargon of a particular field and we know how and when to use them (if we participate in that field). I read you a passage from a linguistics book that was filled with what most likely sounded like impenetrable jargon to you and which is pretty straightforward for a phonologist familiar with the technical language of the field.
Finally, we know that some words are SLANG. Slang is actually a tricky thing to define, but that doesn't stop us from having a clear sense that there are words that are clearly slang words. So, if someone comes up to you and says, "yo, dude, you see that tight car?" I bet you don't think that the speaker is talking about a car that doesn't have a lot of leg room. Instead, the word "tight" is being used to express the speaker's admiration of the way the car looks. "Tight" here (as well as the word "dude" is an example of slang).
From a linguistic point of view, there is nothing particularly unique about slang words as words. They are just words and are formed by the same morphological processes as other words and are subject to the phonotactic constraints and so forth of the language that they are a part of. What's special about them is what we might call their sociopsychological role--i.e. how and when we use them and how we feel about them as words. Here are a couple of properties that slang words have:
Informality. Slang words are almost inevitably used in very informal contexts. Think about when you'd use clueless as opposed to unaware.
Group identification. Many slang words are markers of membership in a particular group that is outside of the "mainstream" adult society. People who use the term "dude" to refer to a person are generally younger (though "dude" has been around for quite some time now). I didn't know the slang use of the word "tight" above, but one of you all (who will remain nameless) taught me. I'm older than the group that knows and uses that word. Many ethnic groups have specific slang terms that identify people who use them as clued in members. In fact, of course, membership works both ways. If you don't know the slang terms, you are also clearly identifying yourself as a non-member of a particular group.
Short life span. Slang terms often have a short life span, though not all do. There are examples like "cram" (particularly relevant here) that mean "study intensely over a short period of time" that have been around for a long time. Other slang terms appear and then disappear from the language fairly quickly. Maybe "groovy" is one such example. I don't think that "groovy" has really had much staying power. It feels dated, as if its productive use really didn't extend beyond the sixties.
Slang terms are scalar. Slang terms actually seem to fall along a continuum of slanginess. Think about the following three examples: unaware, dense, clueless. I'd say that "unaware" is not slangy at all, while "dense" feels marginally slangy, and finally "clueless" feels the slangiest of the three.
A final note. Often times, when slang terms hang around for a long enough time in a language, they lose their slanginess and become more accepted as a part of the standard use of the language. In most cases, they still feel informal to some degree, but they don't feel like slang anymore. An example might be the verb "rip off" meaning "steal". Basically, the idea is that if slanginess is a scale, i.e. a continuum, there is a middle ground where items feel like they somehow aren't clearly slang but they don't feel very formal either. Such words are what linguists sometimes refer to as COLLOQUIAL terms. They are informal, but they do not feel like slang.
Selasa, 12 Januari 2010
anthropology
anthropology
from encyclopedia.farlex.com
The study of humankind. It investigates the cultural, social, and physical diversity of the human species, both past and present. It is divided into two broad categories: biological or physical anthropology, which attempts to explain human biological variation from an evolutionary perspective; and the larger field of social or cultural anthropology, which attempts to explain the variety of human cultures. This differs from sociology in that anthropologists are concerned with cultures and societies other than their own.
Biological anthropology
Biological anthropology is concerned with human palaeontology, primatology, human adaptation, demography, population genetics, and human growth and development.
Social anthropology
Social or cultural anthropology is divided into three subfields: social or cultural anthropology proper, prehistory or prehistoric archaelogy, and anthropological linguistics. The term ‘anthropology’ is frequently used to refer solely to social anthropology. With a wide range of theoretical perspectives and topical interests, it overlaps with many other disciplines. It is a uniquely Western social science.
Participant observation
Anthropology's primary method involves the researcher living for a year or more in another culture, speaking the local language and participating in all aspects of everyday life; and writing about it afterwards. By comparing these accounts, anthropologists hope to understand who we are.
Origins
Anthropology arose as a branch of history in the 1860s after the discovery of stone tools in situ with the remains of pleistocene animals in Brixham Cave, Devon, England, 1858. This discovery created the possibility of ‘prehistory’ by proving that humans had existed for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years, and not the mere 6,000 years generally believed at the time. The remarkable similarity between these tools and those used by some contemporary hunter-gatherer societies made Western scientists think that other aspects of their cultures too might resemble those of the earliest Europeans. Whereas previously these peoples had been viewed as ‘savages’, they now came to be viewed as ‘primitives’.
Evolutionism
19th-century anthropologists such as E B Tylor, Henry Morgan, and James Frazer believed that culture progressed in stages from savagery through barbarism (characterized by the advent of agriculture) to civilization (characterized by the advent of writing). Concerned with reconstructing the evolutionary sequence of various aspects of culture, they combed the writings of missionaries, colonial administrators, and travellers to exotic lands and compared the information about other cultures' degree of advancement. To improve the quality and quantity of information, various questionnaires were developed, the most widely used being Notes and Queries on Anthropology first published by the Royal Anthropological Institute 1874.
Diffusionism
Many of the proposed developmental sequences were contradicted by the facts, however, and at the end of the 19th century evolutionism began to fall into disfavour, being criticized further for its a priori assumptions, its ethnocentrism, its failure to consider the cultural context, and its intellectualistic portrayal of primitive humans. It was also apparent that few cultures had developed in isolation. Many anthropologists believed that progress was due mainly to cultural borrowing or diffusion. Diffusionism gained popularity in the 1880s and 1890s, reaching an extreme in the 1920s with William Perry and Grafton Elliot Smith arguing that all cultures had originated in Egypt.
Functionalism
A turning point came 1898. Fearing that ‘primitive tribes’ were rapidly disappearing in the wake of civilization, and that valuable data would be lost for ever, A C Haddon led the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia. This expedition demonstrated the need for intensive fieldwork conducted by a sole researcher. By 1910 fieldwork had become a prerequisite for professional status as an anthropologist. An explanatory framework to accompany this new method of data collection, known as functionalism, was developed in the 1920s primarily by Bronislaw Malinowski.
Malinowski spent nearly four years in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, where his primary goal was to ‘grasp the native's point of view’. Drawing on the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, he argued that societies were systems of interrelated parts and that cultural phenomena must be analysed in terms of their function within the context of a particular culture. Initially, he viewed culture as an integrated whole, the various aspects of culture functioning to maintain the integrity of that whole. This sociological interpretation represented a major analytical shift away from the ethnocentrism and historical approach of the 19th century towards relativism.
Malinowski later came to see the satisfaction of human biological and psychological needs as the ultimate function of culture. This biological reductionism was rejected by virtually all his contemporaries, who preferred the structural-functionalism of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. Radcliffe-Brown viewed society as consisting of an organized system of relationships or roles and expectations. This system constituted the structure of society and the function of the various aspects of culture was to maintain that structure and so ensure the long-term survival of the society. Functionalism and structural-functionalism dominated British social anthropology from the 1920s until the early 1960s.
Locations
In the early decades of the century, anthropologists worked mostly in Australia and Melanesia, but in the 1930s the focus shifted to Africa, owing, in large part, to the expansion of the colonial administration of the continent. The African societies studied were larger, more difficult to demarcate, and had a complex economic and political organization. This made demonstrating the functional integrity of a culture far more difficult than with the small island populations studied earlier. In consequence, anthropologists began to focus on a particular aspect of culture or a limited problem for investigation, taking the rest of the culture into consideration only in so far as it was relevant to their problem. One of the first do to this was E E Evans-Pritchard, whose Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande 1937 attempted to demonstrate the rationality of believing in witches and magic. African cultures also stimulated additional areas of interest, especially politics. Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard's African Political Systems 1940 was particularly influential. This interest continued through the 1950s, kinship and economics being relatively ignored until the 1960s.
Structuralism
In the 1960s the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced structuralism into anthropology. He argued that kinship systems, myths, and social phenomena in general, are simply surface phenomena that reflect the fundamental structures of the mind. The human mind, he believed, basically classifies the world into pairs of categories, or ‘binary oppositions’, such as male and female, sacred and profane, nature and culture. Structuralism provided a needed stimulus to anthropology and rekindled interest in kinship and myth, but by the mid-1970s opposition to it arose because all meaning was established by contrasts; nothing could carry meaning in itself.
Symbolic anthropology
The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a diversification of theoretical perspectives. Marxist anthropology analysed the social and political organization of production but suffered many of the same difficulties as structuralism. The political-economy school examined the impact of capitalism on the communities anthropologists studied. The dominant analytical perspective, however, was the symbolic anthropology of the US anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who argued that culture is embedded in symbols that need to be interpreted both by the people themselves and by the anthropologist.
US schools
Although both US and British anthropologists rejected evolutionism, they had followed somewhat different theoretical paths early in the 20th century. Franz Boas, the leading US anthropologist at the turn of the century, argued that cultural traits had to be studied in context, and that as much data as possible had to be collected before cultural comparisons could be made or the laws governing cultural variation emerge. This approach, known as historical particularism, was modified by his students Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, who were concerned with cultural patterns and the relationship between culture and personality. This school viewed culture as determining personality and dominated US anthropology during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In the 1940s, however, a neo-evolutionist school emerged through the work of Leslie White and in the 1950s this developed into cultural ecology, where cultural similarities were seen to be due to the process of adapting to specific environmental conditions. In the 1960s Marvin Harris's cultural materialism was an attempt to show how social and cultural forms function to maintain an existing relationship with the environment. Then Geertz's symbolic anthropology began to draw British and US anthropology together.
Current concerns
The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s also witnessed a growth of topical interests. Current concerns include ethnohistory, art, migration, ethnological museums, ethnicity, and how different peoples experience and construct time, space, and landscape. The anthropologist's primary fieldwork goal, however, still remains that advocated by Malinowski: ‘to grasp the native point of view’.
This article is © Research Machines plc 2009. All rights reserved. Helicon Publishing is a division of Research Machines plc.
anthropology - events
1856 Germany German naturalist Johann Fuhrott discovers the first fossil remains of a Neanderthal in Quaternary bed in Feldhofen Cave near Hochdal cave above the Neander Valley, Germany. They cause immediate debate about whether they are the remains of ancient humans or the deformed bones of a modern human.
1858 UK Stone tools in situ with Pleistocene animals are discovered by English school-master William Pengelly at Windmill Hill Cave at Brixham, Dorset, England. They demonstrate that human beings are as old as now extinct animals thus founding the science of prehistory.
1868 France French geologist Louis Lartet is the first to discover the skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans, in a cave near Cro-Magnon, France. They are 35,000 years old.
1894 Netherlands East Indies Dutch anatomist Marie Eugène Dubois announces the discovery, in Java, of the remains of the first specimen of Homo erectus (‘upright man’), which he calls Pithecanthropus erectus, and which has a cranial capacity of 900 cc and is 0.5 to 1 million years old.
1907 Germany The Heidelberg jaw is discovered in a sand pit at Mauer, Germany. Belonging to Homo erectus, it is the oldest European hominid fossil discovered to date and thought to be 400,000 years old.
June 1912 United Kingdom English amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson discovers a human skull with an ape-like jaw, the fossil remains of Piltdown man Eoanthropus dawsoni, in a gravel pit in Piltdown, southeast England. In 1953 they are discovered to be a hoax.
1924 Bechuanaland Australian-born South African anthropologist Raymond Dart discovers the skull of an early hominid at Tuang, Botswana, which he calls Australopithecus africanus. It is now believed to be one of the oldest human ancestors.
1927 China Canadian anthropologist Davidson Black discovers the first specimens of ‘Beijing man’ (Sinanthropous pekinensis), a species of Homo erectus believed to be 300,000 to 400,000 years old, at Choukoutien, China.
1955 France The French scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin publishes Le Phénomène humain/The Phenomenon of Man.
1974 USA US anthropologists Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb discover the 3.2 million-years-old remains of ‘Lucy’, an adult female hominid classified as Australopithecus afarensis, at Hadar in Ethiopia. About 40% of her skeleton is found and it indicates that she was bipedal.
1975 Kenya Kenyan field worler Bernard Ngeneo discovers a Homo erectus skull at Koobi Fora, Kenya, which is estimated to be 1.7 million years old; discovered in the same stratum as Australopithecus boisei, it puts an end to the single species hypothesis, the idea that there has never been more than one hominid species at any point in history.
1975 USA US anthropologist Donald Johanson and his team at Hadar in Ethiopia discover the ‘first family’ – the remains of at least 13 Australopithecus afarensis individuals of varying ages, estimated to be 3.2 million years old.
1979 France French anthropologist François Lévèque discovers a badly crushed Neanderthal skeleton near the village of Saint-Césaire in France. Dated at about 35,000 years old, it is one of the latest Neanderthals known and is of special interest because it is found with tools previously assumed to belong to the Cro-Magnon culture.
1988 Israel Fossil remains of a modern Homo sapiens are discovered in Israel, dated about 92,000 years ago; they suggest modern humans appeared twice as early as previously thought.
1991 Italy The body of a man, complete with clothing, bow, arrows, a copper axe, and other implements, is found preserved in a glacier in the Italian Alps. Known as the ‘iceman’, he is estimated to be 5,300 years old. The discovery leads to a reappraisal of the boundary between the Bronze and the Stone Age.
11 March 1998 Indonesia Australian palaeontologists announce the discovery of 800,000–900,000 year-old stone tools made by Homo erectus on the Indonesian island of Flores. They suggest that H. erectus were seafarers and had the language abilities and social structure to organize the movements of large groups to colonize new islands.
5 December 2000 Kenya French and Kenyan scientists announce that they have unearthed the fossilized remains of humankind's earliest known ancestor dating back 6 million years in Kenya. Christened ‘Millennium Man’, the find predates previous discoveries by more than 1.5 million years.
from encyclopedia.farlex.com
The study of humankind. It investigates the cultural, social, and physical diversity of the human species, both past and present. It is divided into two broad categories: biological or physical anthropology, which attempts to explain human biological variation from an evolutionary perspective; and the larger field of social or cultural anthropology, which attempts to explain the variety of human cultures. This differs from sociology in that anthropologists are concerned with cultures and societies other than their own.
Biological anthropology
Biological anthropology is concerned with human palaeontology, primatology, human adaptation, demography, population genetics, and human growth and development.
Social anthropology
Social or cultural anthropology is divided into three subfields: social or cultural anthropology proper, prehistory or prehistoric archaelogy, and anthropological linguistics. The term ‘anthropology’ is frequently used to refer solely to social anthropology. With a wide range of theoretical perspectives and topical interests, it overlaps with many other disciplines. It is a uniquely Western social science.
Participant observation
Anthropology's primary method involves the researcher living for a year or more in another culture, speaking the local language and participating in all aspects of everyday life; and writing about it afterwards. By comparing these accounts, anthropologists hope to understand who we are.
Origins
Anthropology arose as a branch of history in the 1860s after the discovery of stone tools in situ with the remains of pleistocene animals in Brixham Cave, Devon, England, 1858. This discovery created the possibility of ‘prehistory’ by proving that humans had existed for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years, and not the mere 6,000 years generally believed at the time. The remarkable similarity between these tools and those used by some contemporary hunter-gatherer societies made Western scientists think that other aspects of their cultures too might resemble those of the earliest Europeans. Whereas previously these peoples had been viewed as ‘savages’, they now came to be viewed as ‘primitives’.
Evolutionism
19th-century anthropologists such as E B Tylor, Henry Morgan, and James Frazer believed that culture progressed in stages from savagery through barbarism (characterized by the advent of agriculture) to civilization (characterized by the advent of writing). Concerned with reconstructing the evolutionary sequence of various aspects of culture, they combed the writings of missionaries, colonial administrators, and travellers to exotic lands and compared the information about other cultures' degree of advancement. To improve the quality and quantity of information, various questionnaires were developed, the most widely used being Notes and Queries on Anthropology first published by the Royal Anthropological Institute 1874.
Diffusionism
Many of the proposed developmental sequences were contradicted by the facts, however, and at the end of the 19th century evolutionism began to fall into disfavour, being criticized further for its a priori assumptions, its ethnocentrism, its failure to consider the cultural context, and its intellectualistic portrayal of primitive humans. It was also apparent that few cultures had developed in isolation. Many anthropologists believed that progress was due mainly to cultural borrowing or diffusion. Diffusionism gained popularity in the 1880s and 1890s, reaching an extreme in the 1920s with William Perry and Grafton Elliot Smith arguing that all cultures had originated in Egypt.
Functionalism
A turning point came 1898. Fearing that ‘primitive tribes’ were rapidly disappearing in the wake of civilization, and that valuable data would be lost for ever, A C Haddon led the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia. This expedition demonstrated the need for intensive fieldwork conducted by a sole researcher. By 1910 fieldwork had become a prerequisite for professional status as an anthropologist. An explanatory framework to accompany this new method of data collection, known as functionalism, was developed in the 1920s primarily by Bronislaw Malinowski.
Malinowski spent nearly four years in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, where his primary goal was to ‘grasp the native's point of view’. Drawing on the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, he argued that societies were systems of interrelated parts and that cultural phenomena must be analysed in terms of their function within the context of a particular culture. Initially, he viewed culture as an integrated whole, the various aspects of culture functioning to maintain the integrity of that whole. This sociological interpretation represented a major analytical shift away from the ethnocentrism and historical approach of the 19th century towards relativism.
Malinowski later came to see the satisfaction of human biological and psychological needs as the ultimate function of culture. This biological reductionism was rejected by virtually all his contemporaries, who preferred the structural-functionalism of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. Radcliffe-Brown viewed society as consisting of an organized system of relationships or roles and expectations. This system constituted the structure of society and the function of the various aspects of culture was to maintain that structure and so ensure the long-term survival of the society. Functionalism and structural-functionalism dominated British social anthropology from the 1920s until the early 1960s.
Locations
In the early decades of the century, anthropologists worked mostly in Australia and Melanesia, but in the 1930s the focus shifted to Africa, owing, in large part, to the expansion of the colonial administration of the continent. The African societies studied were larger, more difficult to demarcate, and had a complex economic and political organization. This made demonstrating the functional integrity of a culture far more difficult than with the small island populations studied earlier. In consequence, anthropologists began to focus on a particular aspect of culture or a limited problem for investigation, taking the rest of the culture into consideration only in so far as it was relevant to their problem. One of the first do to this was E E Evans-Pritchard, whose Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande 1937 attempted to demonstrate the rationality of believing in witches and magic. African cultures also stimulated additional areas of interest, especially politics. Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard's African Political Systems 1940 was particularly influential. This interest continued through the 1950s, kinship and economics being relatively ignored until the 1960s.
Structuralism
In the 1960s the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced structuralism into anthropology. He argued that kinship systems, myths, and social phenomena in general, are simply surface phenomena that reflect the fundamental structures of the mind. The human mind, he believed, basically classifies the world into pairs of categories, or ‘binary oppositions’, such as male and female, sacred and profane, nature and culture. Structuralism provided a needed stimulus to anthropology and rekindled interest in kinship and myth, but by the mid-1970s opposition to it arose because all meaning was established by contrasts; nothing could carry meaning in itself.
Symbolic anthropology
The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a diversification of theoretical perspectives. Marxist anthropology analysed the social and political organization of production but suffered many of the same difficulties as structuralism. The political-economy school examined the impact of capitalism on the communities anthropologists studied. The dominant analytical perspective, however, was the symbolic anthropology of the US anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who argued that culture is embedded in symbols that need to be interpreted both by the people themselves and by the anthropologist.
US schools
Although both US and British anthropologists rejected evolutionism, they had followed somewhat different theoretical paths early in the 20th century. Franz Boas, the leading US anthropologist at the turn of the century, argued that cultural traits had to be studied in context, and that as much data as possible had to be collected before cultural comparisons could be made or the laws governing cultural variation emerge. This approach, known as historical particularism, was modified by his students Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, who were concerned with cultural patterns and the relationship between culture and personality. This school viewed culture as determining personality and dominated US anthropology during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In the 1940s, however, a neo-evolutionist school emerged through the work of Leslie White and in the 1950s this developed into cultural ecology, where cultural similarities were seen to be due to the process of adapting to specific environmental conditions. In the 1960s Marvin Harris's cultural materialism was an attempt to show how social and cultural forms function to maintain an existing relationship with the environment. Then Geertz's symbolic anthropology began to draw British and US anthropology together.
Current concerns
The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s also witnessed a growth of topical interests. Current concerns include ethnohistory, art, migration, ethnological museums, ethnicity, and how different peoples experience and construct time, space, and landscape. The anthropologist's primary fieldwork goal, however, still remains that advocated by Malinowski: ‘to grasp the native point of view’.
This article is © Research Machines plc 2009. All rights reserved. Helicon Publishing is a division of Research Machines plc.
anthropology - events
1856 Germany German naturalist Johann Fuhrott discovers the first fossil remains of a Neanderthal in Quaternary bed in Feldhofen Cave near Hochdal cave above the Neander Valley, Germany. They cause immediate debate about whether they are the remains of ancient humans or the deformed bones of a modern human.
1858 UK Stone tools in situ with Pleistocene animals are discovered by English school-master William Pengelly at Windmill Hill Cave at Brixham, Dorset, England. They demonstrate that human beings are as old as now extinct animals thus founding the science of prehistory.
1868 France French geologist Louis Lartet is the first to discover the skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans, in a cave near Cro-Magnon, France. They are 35,000 years old.
1894 Netherlands East Indies Dutch anatomist Marie Eugène Dubois announces the discovery, in Java, of the remains of the first specimen of Homo erectus (‘upright man’), which he calls Pithecanthropus erectus, and which has a cranial capacity of 900 cc and is 0.5 to 1 million years old.
1907 Germany The Heidelberg jaw is discovered in a sand pit at Mauer, Germany. Belonging to Homo erectus, it is the oldest European hominid fossil discovered to date and thought to be 400,000 years old.
June 1912 United Kingdom English amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson discovers a human skull with an ape-like jaw, the fossil remains of Piltdown man Eoanthropus dawsoni, in a gravel pit in Piltdown, southeast England. In 1953 they are discovered to be a hoax.
1924 Bechuanaland Australian-born South African anthropologist Raymond Dart discovers the skull of an early hominid at Tuang, Botswana, which he calls Australopithecus africanus. It is now believed to be one of the oldest human ancestors.
1927 China Canadian anthropologist Davidson Black discovers the first specimens of ‘Beijing man’ (Sinanthropous pekinensis), a species of Homo erectus believed to be 300,000 to 400,000 years old, at Choukoutien, China.
1955 France The French scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin publishes Le Phénomène humain/The Phenomenon of Man.
1974 USA US anthropologists Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb discover the 3.2 million-years-old remains of ‘Lucy’, an adult female hominid classified as Australopithecus afarensis, at Hadar in Ethiopia. About 40% of her skeleton is found and it indicates that she was bipedal.
1975 Kenya Kenyan field worler Bernard Ngeneo discovers a Homo erectus skull at Koobi Fora, Kenya, which is estimated to be 1.7 million years old; discovered in the same stratum as Australopithecus boisei, it puts an end to the single species hypothesis, the idea that there has never been more than one hominid species at any point in history.
1975 USA US anthropologist Donald Johanson and his team at Hadar in Ethiopia discover the ‘first family’ – the remains of at least 13 Australopithecus afarensis individuals of varying ages, estimated to be 3.2 million years old.
1979 France French anthropologist François Lévèque discovers a badly crushed Neanderthal skeleton near the village of Saint-Césaire in France. Dated at about 35,000 years old, it is one of the latest Neanderthals known and is of special interest because it is found with tools previously assumed to belong to the Cro-Magnon culture.
1988 Israel Fossil remains of a modern Homo sapiens are discovered in Israel, dated about 92,000 years ago; they suggest modern humans appeared twice as early as previously thought.
1991 Italy The body of a man, complete with clothing, bow, arrows, a copper axe, and other implements, is found preserved in a glacier in the Italian Alps. Known as the ‘iceman’, he is estimated to be 5,300 years old. The discovery leads to a reappraisal of the boundary between the Bronze and the Stone Age.
11 March 1998 Indonesia Australian palaeontologists announce the discovery of 800,000–900,000 year-old stone tools made by Homo erectus on the Indonesian island of Flores. They suggest that H. erectus were seafarers and had the language abilities and social structure to organize the movements of large groups to colonize new islands.
5 December 2000 Kenya French and Kenyan scientists announce that they have unearthed the fossilized remains of humankind's earliest known ancestor dating back 6 million years in Kenya. Christened ‘Millennium Man’, the find predates previous discoveries by more than 1.5 million years.
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Linguistics
Languages of the world
Theoretical linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
Generative linguistics
Phonology · Morphology · Syntax
Lexis · Semantics · Pragmatics
Descriptive linguistics
Anthropological linguistics
Comparative linguistics · Etymology
Historical linguistics · Phonetics
Sociolinguistics
Applied linguistics
Computational linguistics
Forensic linguistics
Language acquisition
Language assessment
Language development
Language education
Linguistic prescription
Linguistic anthropology
Neurolinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Stylistics
Related articles
History of linguistics
List of linguists
Unsolved problems in linguistics
Portal
v • d • e
Question book-new.svg
This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2008)
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines; for example, as non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain become more and more widespread, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies children's ability to learn language.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Areas of study
* 2 Theories
* 3 Methodologies
* 4 Issues and areas of research
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 Further reading
* 8 External links
[edit] Areas of study
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the components that make up human language.
Linguistic-related areas:
* Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech sounds. Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain processes and understands these sounds.
* Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the relationships between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation).
* Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words are combined together to form sentences.
* Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where syntax is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals with the actual meaning of sentences.
* Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning.
Psychology-related areas:
* The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text.
* Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn and process language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development of children).
[edit] Theories
Theories about how language works in the human mind attempt to account for, among other things, how we associate meaning with the sounds (or signs) of language and how we use syntax—that is, how we manage to put words in the proper order to produce and understand the strings of words we call "sentences." The first of these items—associating sound with meaning—is the least controversial and is generally held to be an area in which animal and human communication have at least some things in common (See animal communication). Syntax, on the other hand, is controversial, and is the focus of the discussion that follows.
There are essentially two schools of thought as to how we manage to create syntactic sentences: (1) syntax is an evolutionary product of increased human intelligence over time and social factors that encouraged the development of spoken language; (2) language exists because humans possess an innate ability, an access to what has been called a "universal grammar." This view holds that the human ability for syntax is "hard-wired" in the brain. This view claims, for example, that complex syntactic features such as recursion are beyond even the potential abilities of the most intelligent and social non-humans. (Recursion, for example, includes the use of relative pronouns to refer back to earlier parts of a sentence—"The girl whose car is blocking my view of the tree that I planted last year is my friend.") The innate view claims that the ability to use syntax like that would not exist without an innate concept that contains the underpinnings for the grammatical rules that produce recursion. Children acquiring a language, thus, have a vast search space to explore among possible human grammars, settling, logically, on the language(s) spoken or signed in their own community of speakers. Such syntax is, according to the second point of view, what defines human language and makes it different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication.
The first view was prevalent until about 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap. As well, the school of psychology known as behaviorism (see Verbal Behavior (1957) by B.F. Skinner) puts forth the point of view that language is behavior shaped by conditioned response. The second point of view (the "innate" one) can fairly be said to have begun with Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959 in the pages of the journal Language.[1] That review started what has been termed "the cognitive revolution" in psychology.
The field of psycholinguistics since then has been defined by reactions to Chomsky, pro and con. The pro view still holds that the human ability to use syntax is qualitatively different from any sort of animal communication. That ability might have resulted from a favorable mutation (extremely unlikely) or (more likely) from an adaptation of skills evolved for other purposes. That is, precise syntax might, indeed, serve group needs; better linguistic expression might produce more cohesion, cooperation, and potential for survival, BUT precise syntax can only have developed from rudimentary—or no—syntax, which would have had no survival value and, thus, would not have evolved at all. Thus, one looks for other skills, the characteristics of which might have later been useful for syntax. In the terminology of modern evolutionary biology, these skills would be said to be "pre-adapted" for syntax (see also exaptation). Just what those skills might have been is the focus of recent research—or, at least, speculation.
The con view still holds that language—including syntax—is an outgrowth of hundreds of thousands of years of increasing intelligence and tens of thousands of years of human interaction. From that view, syntax in language gradually increased group cohesion and potential for survival. Language—syntax and all—is a cultural artifact. This view challenges the "innate" view as scientifically unfalsifiable; that is to say, it can't be tested; the fact that a particular, conceivable syntactic structure does not exist in any of the world's finite repertoire of languages is an interesting observation, but it is not proof of a genetic constraint on possible forms, nor does it prove that such forms couldn't exist or couldn't be learned.
Contemporary theorists, besides Chomsky, working in the field of theories of psycholinguistics include George Lakoff and Steven Pinker.
[edit] Methodologies
Much methodology in psycholinguistics takes the form of behavioral experiments incorporating a lexical decision task. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with some form of linguistic input and asked to perform a task (e.g. make a judgment, reproduce the stimulus, read a visually presented word aloud). Reaction times (usually on the order of milliseconds) and proportion of correct responses are the most often employed measures of performance. Such experiments often take advantage of priming effects, whereby a "priming" word or phrase appearing in the experiment can speed up the lexical decision for a related "target" word later.[2]
Such tasks might include, for example, asking the subject to convert nouns into verbs; e.g., "book" suggests "to write," "water" suggests "to drink," and so on. Another experiment might present an active sentence such as "Bob threw the ball to Bill" and a passive equivalent, "The ball was thrown to Bill by Bob" and then ask the question, "Who threw the ball?" We might then conclude (as is the case) that active sentences are processed more easily (faster) than passive sentences. More interestingly, we might also find out (as is the case) that some people are unable to understand passive sentences; we might then make some tentative steps towards understanding certain types of language deficits (generally grouped under the broad term, aphasia).[3]
Until the recent advent of non-invasive medical techniques, brain surgery was the preferred way for language researchers to discover how language works in the brain. For example, severing the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) was at one time a treatment for some forms of epilepsy. Researchers could then study the ways in which the comprehension and production of language were affected by such drastic surgery. Where an illness made brain surgery necessary, language researchers had an opportunity to pursue their research.
Newer, non-invasive techniques now include brain imaging by positron emission tomography (PET); functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); event-related potentials (ERPs) in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG); and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Brain imaging techniques vary in their spatial and temporal resolutions (fMRI has a resolution of a few thousand neurons per pixel, and ERP has millisecond accuracy). Each type of methodology presents a set of advantages and disadvantages for studying a particular problem in psycholinguistics.
Computational modeling - e.g. the DRC model of reading and word recognition proposed by Coltheart and colleagues[4] - is another methodology. It refers to the practice of setting up cognitive models in the form of executable computer programs. Such programs are useful because they require theorists to be explicit in their hypotheses and because they can be used to generate accurate predictions for theoretical models that are so complex that they render discursive analysis unreliable. One example of computational modeling is McClelland and Elman's TRACE model of speech perception.[5]
More recently, eye tracking has been used to study online language processing. Beginning with Rayner (1978)[6] the importance and informativity of eye-movements during reading was established. Tanenhaus et al.,[7] have performed a number of visual-world eye-tracking studies to study the cognitive processes related to spoken language. Since eye movements are closely linked to the current focus of attention, language processing can be studied by monitoring eye movements while a subject is presented with linguistic input.
[edit] Issues and areas of research
Psycholinguistics is concerned with the nature of the computations and processes that the brain undergoes to comprehend and produce language. For example, the cohort model seeks to describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears or sees linguistic input.[2][8]
Recent research using new non-invasive imaging techniques seeks to shed light on just where certain language processes occur in the brain.
There are a number of unanswered questions in psycholinguistics, such as whether the human ability to use syntax is based on innate mental structures or emerges from interaction with other humans, and whether some animals can be taught the syntax of human language.
Two other major subfields of psycholinguistics investigate first language acquisition, the process by which infants acquire language, and second language acquisition. In addition, it is much more difficult for adults to acquire second languages than it is for infants to learn their first language (bilingual infants are able to learn both of their native languages easily). Thus, sensitive periods may exist during which language can be learned readily.[9] A great deal of research in psycholinguistics focuses on how this ability develops and diminishes over time. It also seems to be the case that the more languages one knows, the easier it is to learn more.[10]
The field of aphasiology deals with language deficits that arise because of brain damage. Studies in aphasiology can both offer advances in therapy for individuals suffering from aphasia, and further insight into how the brain processes language.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Linguistics
Languages of the world
Theoretical linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
Generative linguistics
Phonology · Morphology · Syntax
Lexis · Semantics · Pragmatics
Descriptive linguistics
Anthropological linguistics
Comparative linguistics · Etymology
Historical linguistics · Phonetics
Sociolinguistics
Applied linguistics
Computational linguistics
Forensic linguistics
Language acquisition
Language assessment
Language development
Language education
Linguistic prescription
Linguistic anthropology
Neurolinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Stylistics
Related articles
History of linguistics
List of linguists
Unsolved problems in linguistics
Portal
v • d • e
Question book-new.svg
This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2008)
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines; for example, as non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain become more and more widespread, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies children's ability to learn language.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Areas of study
* 2 Theories
* 3 Methodologies
* 4 Issues and areas of research
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 Further reading
* 8 External links
[edit] Areas of study
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the components that make up human language.
Linguistic-related areas:
* Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech sounds. Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain processes and understands these sounds.
* Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the relationships between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation).
* Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words are combined together to form sentences.
* Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where syntax is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals with the actual meaning of sentences.
* Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning.
Psychology-related areas:
* The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text.
* Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn and process language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development of children).
[edit] Theories
Theories about how language works in the human mind attempt to account for, among other things, how we associate meaning with the sounds (or signs) of language and how we use syntax—that is, how we manage to put words in the proper order to produce and understand the strings of words we call "sentences." The first of these items—associating sound with meaning—is the least controversial and is generally held to be an area in which animal and human communication have at least some things in common (See animal communication). Syntax, on the other hand, is controversial, and is the focus of the discussion that follows.
There are essentially two schools of thought as to how we manage to create syntactic sentences: (1) syntax is an evolutionary product of increased human intelligence over time and social factors that encouraged the development of spoken language; (2) language exists because humans possess an innate ability, an access to what has been called a "universal grammar." This view holds that the human ability for syntax is "hard-wired" in the brain. This view claims, for example, that complex syntactic features such as recursion are beyond even the potential abilities of the most intelligent and social non-humans. (Recursion, for example, includes the use of relative pronouns to refer back to earlier parts of a sentence—"The girl whose car is blocking my view of the tree that I planted last year is my friend.") The innate view claims that the ability to use syntax like that would not exist without an innate concept that contains the underpinnings for the grammatical rules that produce recursion. Children acquiring a language, thus, have a vast search space to explore among possible human grammars, settling, logically, on the language(s) spoken or signed in their own community of speakers. Such syntax is, according to the second point of view, what defines human language and makes it different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication.
The first view was prevalent until about 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap. As well, the school of psychology known as behaviorism (see Verbal Behavior (1957) by B.F. Skinner) puts forth the point of view that language is behavior shaped by conditioned response. The second point of view (the "innate" one) can fairly be said to have begun with Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959 in the pages of the journal Language.[1] That review started what has been termed "the cognitive revolution" in psychology.
The field of psycholinguistics since then has been defined by reactions to Chomsky, pro and con. The pro view still holds that the human ability to use syntax is qualitatively different from any sort of animal communication. That ability might have resulted from a favorable mutation (extremely unlikely) or (more likely) from an adaptation of skills evolved for other purposes. That is, precise syntax might, indeed, serve group needs; better linguistic expression might produce more cohesion, cooperation, and potential for survival, BUT precise syntax can only have developed from rudimentary—or no—syntax, which would have had no survival value and, thus, would not have evolved at all. Thus, one looks for other skills, the characteristics of which might have later been useful for syntax. In the terminology of modern evolutionary biology, these skills would be said to be "pre-adapted" for syntax (see also exaptation). Just what those skills might have been is the focus of recent research—or, at least, speculation.
The con view still holds that language—including syntax—is an outgrowth of hundreds of thousands of years of increasing intelligence and tens of thousands of years of human interaction. From that view, syntax in language gradually increased group cohesion and potential for survival. Language—syntax and all—is a cultural artifact. This view challenges the "innate" view as scientifically unfalsifiable; that is to say, it can't be tested; the fact that a particular, conceivable syntactic structure does not exist in any of the world's finite repertoire of languages is an interesting observation, but it is not proof of a genetic constraint on possible forms, nor does it prove that such forms couldn't exist or couldn't be learned.
Contemporary theorists, besides Chomsky, working in the field of theories of psycholinguistics include George Lakoff and Steven Pinker.
[edit] Methodologies
Much methodology in psycholinguistics takes the form of behavioral experiments incorporating a lexical decision task. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with some form of linguistic input and asked to perform a task (e.g. make a judgment, reproduce the stimulus, read a visually presented word aloud). Reaction times (usually on the order of milliseconds) and proportion of correct responses are the most often employed measures of performance. Such experiments often take advantage of priming effects, whereby a "priming" word or phrase appearing in the experiment can speed up the lexical decision for a related "target" word later.[2]
Such tasks might include, for example, asking the subject to convert nouns into verbs; e.g., "book" suggests "to write," "water" suggests "to drink," and so on. Another experiment might present an active sentence such as "Bob threw the ball to Bill" and a passive equivalent, "The ball was thrown to Bill by Bob" and then ask the question, "Who threw the ball?" We might then conclude (as is the case) that active sentences are processed more easily (faster) than passive sentences. More interestingly, we might also find out (as is the case) that some people are unable to understand passive sentences; we might then make some tentative steps towards understanding certain types of language deficits (generally grouped under the broad term, aphasia).[3]
Until the recent advent of non-invasive medical techniques, brain surgery was the preferred way for language researchers to discover how language works in the brain. For example, severing the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) was at one time a treatment for some forms of epilepsy. Researchers could then study the ways in which the comprehension and production of language were affected by such drastic surgery. Where an illness made brain surgery necessary, language researchers had an opportunity to pursue their research.
Newer, non-invasive techniques now include brain imaging by positron emission tomography (PET); functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); event-related potentials (ERPs) in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG); and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Brain imaging techniques vary in their spatial and temporal resolutions (fMRI has a resolution of a few thousand neurons per pixel, and ERP has millisecond accuracy). Each type of methodology presents a set of advantages and disadvantages for studying a particular problem in psycholinguistics.
Computational modeling - e.g. the DRC model of reading and word recognition proposed by Coltheart and colleagues[4] - is another methodology. It refers to the practice of setting up cognitive models in the form of executable computer programs. Such programs are useful because they require theorists to be explicit in their hypotheses and because they can be used to generate accurate predictions for theoretical models that are so complex that they render discursive analysis unreliable. One example of computational modeling is McClelland and Elman's TRACE model of speech perception.[5]
More recently, eye tracking has been used to study online language processing. Beginning with Rayner (1978)[6] the importance and informativity of eye-movements during reading was established. Tanenhaus et al.,[7] have performed a number of visual-world eye-tracking studies to study the cognitive processes related to spoken language. Since eye movements are closely linked to the current focus of attention, language processing can be studied by monitoring eye movements while a subject is presented with linguistic input.
[edit] Issues and areas of research
Psycholinguistics is concerned with the nature of the computations and processes that the brain undergoes to comprehend and produce language. For example, the cohort model seeks to describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears or sees linguistic input.[2][8]
Recent research using new non-invasive imaging techniques seeks to shed light on just where certain language processes occur in the brain.
There are a number of unanswered questions in psycholinguistics, such as whether the human ability to use syntax is based on innate mental structures or emerges from interaction with other humans, and whether some animals can be taught the syntax of human language.
Two other major subfields of psycholinguistics investigate first language acquisition, the process by which infants acquire language, and second language acquisition. In addition, it is much more difficult for adults to acquire second languages than it is for infants to learn their first language (bilingual infants are able to learn both of their native languages easily). Thus, sensitive periods may exist during which language can be learned readily.[9] A great deal of research in psycholinguistics focuses on how this ability develops and diminishes over time. It also seems to be the case that the more languages one knows, the easier it is to learn more.[10]
The field of aphasiology deals with language deficits that arise because of brain damage. Studies in aphasiology can both offer advances in therapy for individuals suffering from aphasia, and further insight into how the brain processes language.
Dialectology
Dialectology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Mergefrom.svg
It has been suggested that Dialect#Concepts in dialectology be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)
Dialectology (from Greek διάλεκτος, dialektos, "talk, dialect"; and -λογία, -logia) is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.
Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical and phonological features that correspond to regional areas. Thus they usually deal with populations that have lived in certain areas for generations, but also with migrant groups that bring their languages to new areas (see language contact).
William Labov is one of the most prominent researchers in this field.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 History
* 2 Methods of data collection
* 3 See also
* 4 References
[edit] History
Dialect studies began in the latter half of the 19th century. The idea of dialect studies began in 1876, by Georg Wenker, who sent postal questionnaires out over Northern Germany. These postal questionnaires contained a list of sentences written in Standard German. These sentences were then transcribed into the local dialect, reflecting dialectal differences. Many studies proceeded from this, and over the next century dialect studies were carried out all over the world. Joseph Wright produced the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary in 1905.
Traditional studies in Dialectology were generally aimed at producing dialect maps, whereby imaginary lines were drawn over a map to indicate different dialect areas. The move away from traditional methods of language study however caused linguists to become more concerned with social factors. Dialectologists therefore began to study social, as well as regional variation. The Linguistic Atlas of the United States (1930s) was amongst the first dialect studies to take social factors into account.
In the 1950s, the University of Leeds undertook the Survey of English Dialects, which focused mostly on rural speech in England and the eastern areas of Wales.
This shift in interest consequently saw the birth of Sociolinguistics, which is a mixture of dialectology and social sciences.
[edit] Methods of data collection
Dialect researchers typically use questionnaires to gather data on the dialect they are researching. There are two main types of questionnaires, direct and indirect.
Researchers using direct questionnaires will present the subject with a set of questions that demand a specific answer and are designed to gather either lexical or phonological information. For example, the linguist may ask the subject the name for various items, or ask him or her to repeat certain words.
Indirect questionnaires are typically more open-ended and take longer to complete than direct questionnaires. Researchers using this method will sit down with a subject and begins a conversation on a specific topic. For example, he may question the subject about farm work, food and cooking, or some other subject, and gather lexical and phonological information from the information provided by the subject. The researcher may also begin a sentence, but allow the subject to finish it for him, or ask a question that does not demand a specific answer, such as “What are the most common plants and trees around here?”[1]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Mergefrom.svg
It has been suggested that Dialect#Concepts in dialectology be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)
Dialectology (from Greek διάλεκτος, dialektos, "talk, dialect"; and -λογία, -logia) is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.
Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical and phonological features that correspond to regional areas. Thus they usually deal with populations that have lived in certain areas for generations, but also with migrant groups that bring their languages to new areas (see language contact).
William Labov is one of the most prominent researchers in this field.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 History
* 2 Methods of data collection
* 3 See also
* 4 References
[edit] History
Dialect studies began in the latter half of the 19th century. The idea of dialect studies began in 1876, by Georg Wenker, who sent postal questionnaires out over Northern Germany. These postal questionnaires contained a list of sentences written in Standard German. These sentences were then transcribed into the local dialect, reflecting dialectal differences. Many studies proceeded from this, and over the next century dialect studies were carried out all over the world. Joseph Wright produced the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary in 1905.
Traditional studies in Dialectology were generally aimed at producing dialect maps, whereby imaginary lines were drawn over a map to indicate different dialect areas. The move away from traditional methods of language study however caused linguists to become more concerned with social factors. Dialectologists therefore began to study social, as well as regional variation. The Linguistic Atlas of the United States (1930s) was amongst the first dialect studies to take social factors into account.
In the 1950s, the University of Leeds undertook the Survey of English Dialects, which focused mostly on rural speech in England and the eastern areas of Wales.
This shift in interest consequently saw the birth of Sociolinguistics, which is a mixture of dialectology and social sciences.
[edit] Methods of data collection
Dialect researchers typically use questionnaires to gather data on the dialect they are researching. There are two main types of questionnaires, direct and indirect.
Researchers using direct questionnaires will present the subject with a set of questions that demand a specific answer and are designed to gather either lexical or phonological information. For example, the linguist may ask the subject the name for various items, or ask him or her to repeat certain words.
Indirect questionnaires are typically more open-ended and take longer to complete than direct questionnaires. Researchers using this method will sit down with a subject and begins a conversation on a specific topic. For example, he may question the subject about farm work, food and cooking, or some other subject, and gather lexical and phonological information from the information provided by the subject. The researcher may also begin a sentence, but allow the subject to finish it for him, or ask a question that does not demand a specific answer, such as “What are the most common plants and trees around here?”[1]
Morphology (linguistics)
Morphology (linguistics)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Text document with red question mark.svg
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)
Linguistics
Languages of the world
Theoretical linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
Generative linguistics
Phonology · Morphology · Syntax
Lexis · Semantics · Pragmatics
Descriptive linguistics
Anthropological linguistics
Comparative linguistics · Etymology
Historical linguistics · Phonetics
Sociolinguistics
Applied linguistics
Computational linguistics
Forensic linguistics
Language acquisition
Language assessment
Language development
Language education
Linguistic prescription
Linguistic anthropology
Neurolinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Stylistics
Related articles
History of linguistics
List of linguists
Unsolved problems in linguistics
Portal
v • d • e
Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of words (words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology). While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher (in one sense). The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 History
* 2 Fundamental concepts
o 2.1 Lexemes and word forms
+ 2.1.1 Prosodic word vs. morphological word
o 2.2 Inflection vs. word formation
o 2.3 Paradigms and morphosyntax
o 2.4 Allomorphy
o 2.5 Lexical morphology
* 3 Models
o 3.1 Morpheme-based morphology
o 3.2 Lexeme-based morphology
o 3.3 Word-based morphology
* 4 Morphological Typology
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 Further reading
[edit] History
The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini, who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a Constituency Grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by Marāḥ al-arwāḥ and Aḥmad b. ‘alī Mas‘ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE.[1]
The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.[2]
[edit] Fundamental concepts
[edit] Lexemes and word forms
The distinction between these two senses of "word" is arguably the most important one in morphology. The first sense of "word", the one in which dog and dogs are "the same word", is called a lexeme. The second sense is called word form. We thus say that dog and dogs are different forms of the same lexeme. Dog and dog catcher, on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a lemma, or citation form.
[edit] Prosodic word vs. morphological word
This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this section if you can. (February 2007)
Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of 'NOUN-PHRASE1 and NOUN-PHRASE2' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme level of this theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language.[3] In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes instead of by independent "words". The three word English phrase, "with his club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one word in many languages. But affixation for semantic relations in Kwak'wala differs dramatically (from the viewpoint of those whose language is not Kwak'wala) from such affixation in other languages for this reason: the affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically, but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwakw'ala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):[4]
kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəmai-χ-a q'asa-s-isi t'alwagwayu
Morpheme by morpheme translation:
kwixʔid-i-da = clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER
bəgwanəma-χ-a = man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER
q'asa-s-is = otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3.PERSON.SINGULAR-POSSESSIVE
t'alwagwayu = club.
"the man clubbed the otter with his club"
(Notation notes:
1. accusative case marks an entity that something is done to.
2. determiners are words such as "the", "this", "that".
3. the concept of "pivot" is a theoretical construct that is not relevant to this discussion.)
That is, to the speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers -i-da (PIVOT-'the'), referring to man, attaches not to bəgwanəma ('man'), but instead to the "verb"; the markers -χ-a (ACCUSATIVE-'the'), referring to otter, attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q'asa ('otter'), etc. To summarize differently: a speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words:
kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q'asa s-isi-t'alwagwayu
"clubbed PIVOT-the-mani hit-the-otter with-hisi-club
A central publication on this topic is the recent volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2007), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of "word" in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic, possessing the grammatical features of independent words but the prosodic-phonological lack of freedom of bound morphemes. The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory.
[edit] Inflection vs. word formation
Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called word formation. The English plural, as illustrated by dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule; compounds like dog catcher or dishwasher provide an example of a word formation rule. Informally, word formation rules form "new words" (that is, new lexemes), while inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).
There is a further distinction between two kinds of word formation: derivation and compounding. Compounding is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form; dog catcher is therefore a compound, because both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right before the compounding process has been applied, and are subsequently treated as one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. One example of derivation is clear in this case: the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing it with the derivational prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from the verb depend.
The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear cut. There are many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The next section will attempt to clarify this distinction.
Word formation is a process, as we have said, where you combine two complete words, whereas with inflection you can combine a suffix with some verb to change its form to subject of the sentence. For example: in the present indefinite, we use ‘go’ with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, whereas for third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns we use ‘goes’. So this ‘-es’ is an inflectional marker and is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word’s grammatical category whereas in the process of inflection the word never changes its grammatical category.
[edit] Paradigms and morphosyntax
Linguistic typology
Morphological
Isolating
Synthetic
Polysynthetic
Fusional
Agglutinative
Morphosyntactic
Alignment
Accusative
Ergative
Split ergative
Philippine
Active–stative
Tripartite
Inverse marking
Syntactic pivot
Theta role
Word Order
VO languages
Subject Verb Object
Verb Subject Object
Verb Object Subject
OV languages
Subject Object Verb
Object Subject Verb
Object Verb Subject
Time Manner Place
Place Manner Time
This box: view • talk • edit
A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns. Accordingly, the word forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person (1st., 2nd., 3rd.), number (singular vs. plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and case (subjective, objective, and possessive). See English personal pronouns for the details.
The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves.
An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word formation are not restricted by any corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax, and word formation is not. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word formation or compounding.
[edit] Allomorphy
In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning: in each pair, the first word means "one of X", while the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -s affixed to the second word, signaling the key distinction between singular and plural entities.
One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern, or is not signaled at all. Even cases considered "regular", with the final -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, an "extra" vowel appears before the -s. These cases, where the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", are called allomorphy.
Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules, by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. In order to "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃəz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.
[edit] Lexical morphology
Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding.
[edit] Models
There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture the distinctions above in different ways. These are,
* Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement approach.
* Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process approach.
* Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-and-Paradigm approach.
Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is very strong, it is not absolute.
[edit] Morpheme-based morphology
In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.[5] In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest (and most naïve) form, this way of analyzing word forms treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement. More modern and sophisticated approaches seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenative, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for Item-and-Arrangement theories and similar approaches.
Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms (cf. Beard 1995 for an overview and references):
1. Baudoin’s SINGLE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: Roots and affixes have the same status in the theory, they are MORPHEMES.
2. Bloomfield’s SIGN BASE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: As morphemes, they are dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning.
3. Bloomfield’s LEXICAL MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: The morphemes, affixes and roots alike, are stored in the lexicon.
Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one Hockettian. (cf. Bloomfield 1933 and Charles F. Hockett 1947). For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but it was not meaning itself. For Hockett, morphemes are meaning elements, not form elements. For him, there is a morpheme plural, with the allomorphs -s, -en, -ren etc. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, these two views are mixed in unsystematic ways, so that a writer may talk about "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme -s" in the same sentence, although these are different things.
[edit] Lexeme-based morphology
Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.
[edit] Word-based morphology
Word-based morphology is (usually) a Word-and-paradigm approach. This theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms, or to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of a pattern different from the one that has been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation).
[edit] Morphological Typology
Main article: Morphological typology
In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily separable morphemes; while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are "fused" together. This leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. The classic example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages.
Considering the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this classification is not at all clear cut, and many languages do not neatly fit any one of these types, and some fit in more than one way. A continuum of complex morphology of language may be adapted when considering languages.
The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or less match different categories in this typology. The Item-and-Arrangement approach fits very naturally with agglutinative languages; while the Item-and-Process and Word-and-Paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages.
The reader should also note that the classical typology mostly applies to inflectional morphology. There is very little fusion going on with word formation. Languages may be classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either by using word formation (synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases (analytic).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Text document with red question mark.svg
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)
Linguistics
Languages of the world
Theoretical linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
Generative linguistics
Phonology · Morphology · Syntax
Lexis · Semantics · Pragmatics
Descriptive linguistics
Anthropological linguistics
Comparative linguistics · Etymology
Historical linguistics · Phonetics
Sociolinguistics
Applied linguistics
Computational linguistics
Forensic linguistics
Language acquisition
Language assessment
Language development
Language education
Linguistic prescription
Linguistic anthropology
Neurolinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Stylistics
Related articles
History of linguistics
List of linguists
Unsolved problems in linguistics
Portal
v • d • e
Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of words (words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology). While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher (in one sense). The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 History
* 2 Fundamental concepts
o 2.1 Lexemes and word forms
+ 2.1.1 Prosodic word vs. morphological word
o 2.2 Inflection vs. word formation
o 2.3 Paradigms and morphosyntax
o 2.4 Allomorphy
o 2.5 Lexical morphology
* 3 Models
o 3.1 Morpheme-based morphology
o 3.2 Lexeme-based morphology
o 3.3 Word-based morphology
* 4 Morphological Typology
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 Further reading
[edit] History
The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini, who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a Constituency Grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by Marāḥ al-arwāḥ and Aḥmad b. ‘alī Mas‘ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE.[1]
The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.[2]
[edit] Fundamental concepts
[edit] Lexemes and word forms
The distinction between these two senses of "word" is arguably the most important one in morphology. The first sense of "word", the one in which dog and dogs are "the same word", is called a lexeme. The second sense is called word form. We thus say that dog and dogs are different forms of the same lexeme. Dog and dog catcher, on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a lemma, or citation form.
[edit] Prosodic word vs. morphological word
This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this section if you can. (February 2007)
Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of 'NOUN-PHRASE1 and NOUN-PHRASE2' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme level of this theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language.[3] In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes instead of by independent "words". The three word English phrase, "with his club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one word in many languages. But affixation for semantic relations in Kwak'wala differs dramatically (from the viewpoint of those whose language is not Kwak'wala) from such affixation in other languages for this reason: the affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically, but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwakw'ala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):[4]
kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəmai-χ-a q'asa-s-isi t'alwagwayu
Morpheme by morpheme translation:
kwixʔid-i-da = clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER
bəgwanəma-χ-a = man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER
q'asa-s-is = otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3.PERSON.SINGULAR-POSSESSIVE
t'alwagwayu = club.
"the man clubbed the otter with his club"
(Notation notes:
1. accusative case marks an entity that something is done to.
2. determiners are words such as "the", "this", "that".
3. the concept of "pivot" is a theoretical construct that is not relevant to this discussion.)
That is, to the speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers -i-da (PIVOT-'the'), referring to man, attaches not to bəgwanəma ('man'), but instead to the "verb"; the markers -χ-a (ACCUSATIVE-'the'), referring to otter, attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q'asa ('otter'), etc. To summarize differently: a speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words:
kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q'asa s-isi-t'alwagwayu
"clubbed PIVOT-the-mani hit-the-otter with-hisi-club
A central publication on this topic is the recent volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2007), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of "word" in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic, possessing the grammatical features of independent words but the prosodic-phonological lack of freedom of bound morphemes. The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory.
[edit] Inflection vs. word formation
Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called word formation. The English plural, as illustrated by dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule; compounds like dog catcher or dishwasher provide an example of a word formation rule. Informally, word formation rules form "new words" (that is, new lexemes), while inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).
There is a further distinction between two kinds of word formation: derivation and compounding. Compounding is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form; dog catcher is therefore a compound, because both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right before the compounding process has been applied, and are subsequently treated as one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. One example of derivation is clear in this case: the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing it with the derivational prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from the verb depend.
The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear cut. There are many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The next section will attempt to clarify this distinction.
Word formation is a process, as we have said, where you combine two complete words, whereas with inflection you can combine a suffix with some verb to change its form to subject of the sentence. For example: in the present indefinite, we use ‘go’ with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, whereas for third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns we use ‘goes’. So this ‘-es’ is an inflectional marker and is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word’s grammatical category whereas in the process of inflection the word never changes its grammatical category.
[edit] Paradigms and morphosyntax
Linguistic typology
Morphological
Isolating
Synthetic
Polysynthetic
Fusional
Agglutinative
Morphosyntactic
Alignment
Accusative
Ergative
Split ergative
Philippine
Active–stative
Tripartite
Inverse marking
Syntactic pivot
Theta role
Word Order
VO languages
Subject Verb Object
Verb Subject Object
Verb Object Subject
OV languages
Subject Object Verb
Object Subject Verb
Object Verb Subject
Time Manner Place
Place Manner Time
This box: view • talk • edit
A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns. Accordingly, the word forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person (1st., 2nd., 3rd.), number (singular vs. plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and case (subjective, objective, and possessive). See English personal pronouns for the details.
The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves.
An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word formation are not restricted by any corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax, and word formation is not. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word formation or compounding.
[edit] Allomorphy
In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning: in each pair, the first word means "one of X", while the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -s affixed to the second word, signaling the key distinction between singular and plural entities.
One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern, or is not signaled at all. Even cases considered "regular", with the final -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, an "extra" vowel appears before the -s. These cases, where the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", are called allomorphy.
Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules, by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. In order to "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃəz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.
[edit] Lexical morphology
Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding.
[edit] Models
There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture the distinctions above in different ways. These are,
* Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement approach.
* Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process approach.
* Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-and-Paradigm approach.
Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is very strong, it is not absolute.
[edit] Morpheme-based morphology
In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.[5] In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest (and most naïve) form, this way of analyzing word forms treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement. More modern and sophisticated approaches seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenative, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for Item-and-Arrangement theories and similar approaches.
Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms (cf. Beard 1995 for an overview and references):
1. Baudoin’s SINGLE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: Roots and affixes have the same status in the theory, they are MORPHEMES.
2. Bloomfield’s SIGN BASE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: As morphemes, they are dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning.
3. Bloomfield’s LEXICAL MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: The morphemes, affixes and roots alike, are stored in the lexicon.
Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one Hockettian. (cf. Bloomfield 1933 and Charles F. Hockett 1947). For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but it was not meaning itself. For Hockett, morphemes are meaning elements, not form elements. For him, there is a morpheme plural, with the allomorphs -s, -en, -ren etc. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, these two views are mixed in unsystematic ways, so that a writer may talk about "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme -s" in the same sentence, although these are different things.
[edit] Lexeme-based morphology
Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.
[edit] Word-based morphology
Word-based morphology is (usually) a Word-and-paradigm approach. This theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms, or to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of a pattern different from the one that has been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation).
[edit] Morphological Typology
Main article: Morphological typology
In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily separable morphemes; while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are "fused" together. This leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. The classic example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages.
Considering the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this classification is not at all clear cut, and many languages do not neatly fit any one of these types, and some fit in more than one way. A continuum of complex morphology of language may be adapted when considering languages.
The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or less match different categories in this typology. The Item-and-Arrangement approach fits very naturally with agglutinative languages; while the Item-and-Process and Word-and-Paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages.
The reader should also note that the classical typology mostly applies to inflectional morphology. There is very little fusion going on with word formation. Languages may be classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either by using word formation (synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases (analytic).
Langganan:
Postingan (Atom)
