Introduction To Linguistics

Transcription

Introduction to LinguisticsMarcus KrachtDepartment of Linguistics, UCLA3125 Campbell Hall450 Hilgard AvenueLos Angeles, CA 90095–1543kracht@humnet.ucla.edu

2ContentsContentsLecture 1: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Lecture 2: Phonetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12Lecture 3: Phonology I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24Lecture 4: Phonology II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41Lecture 5: Phonology III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55Lecture 6: Phonology IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66Lecture 7: Morphology I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79Lecture 8: Syntax I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86Lecture 9: Syntax II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98Lecture 10: Syntax III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109Lecture 11: Syntax IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119Lecture 12: Syntax V . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134Lecture 13: Morphology II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144Lecture 14: Semantics I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154Lecture 15: Semantics II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160Lecture 16: Semantics III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168Lecture 17: Semantics IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177Lecture 18: Semantics V . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186Lecture 19: Language Families and History of Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

Lecture 1: IntroductionLanguages are sets of signs. Signs combine an exponent (a sequenceof letters or sounds) with a meaning. Grammars are ways to generatesigns from more basic signs. Signs combine a form and a meaning,and they are identical with neither their exponent nor with their meaning.Before we start. I have tried to be as explicit as I could in preparing these notes.You will find that some of the technicalities are demanding at first sight. Donot panic! You are not expected to master these technicalities right away. Thetechnical character is basically due to my desire to be as explicit and detailed aspossible. For some of you this might actually be helpful. If you are not amongthem you may want to read some other book on the side (which I encourage you todo anyway). However, linguistics is getting increasingly formal and mathematical,and you are well advised to get used to this style of doing science. So, if you donot understand right away what I am saying, you will simply have to go over itagain and again. And keep asking questions! New words and technical termsthat are used for the first time are typed in bold-face. If you are supposed toknow what they mean, a definition will be given right away. The definition isvalid throughout the entire course, but be aware of the fact that other people mightdefine things differently. This applies when you read other books, for example.You should beware of possible discrepancies in terminology. If you are not givena definition elsewhere, be cautious. If you are given a different definition it does not mean that the other books get it wrong. The symbolin the margin signalssome material that is difficult, and optional. Such passages are put in for thosewho want to get a perfect understanding of the material; but they are not requriedknowledge.(End of note)Language is a means to communicate, it is a semiotic system. By that wesimply mean that it is a set of signs. Its A sign is a pair consisting—in the wordsof Ferdinand de Saussure—of a signifier and a signified. We prefer to call thesignifier the exponent and the signified the meaning. For example, in English thestring /dog/ is a signifier, and its signified is, say, doghood, or the set of all dogs.(I use the slashes to enclose concrete signifiers, in this case sequences of letters.)Sign systems are ubiquitous: clocks, road signs, pictograms—they all are parts of

4Lecture 1: Introductionsign systems. Language differs from them only in its complexity. This explainswhy language signs have much more internal structure than ordinary signs. Fornotice that language allows to express virtually every thought that we have, andthe number of signs that we can produce is literally endless. Although one mayfind it debatable whether or not language is actually infinite, it is clear that weare able to understand utterances that we have never heard before. Every year,hundreds of thousands of books appear, and clearly each of them is new. If itwere the same as a previously published book this would be considered a breachof copyright! However, no native speaker of the language experiences troubleunderstanding them (apart from technical books).It might be far fetched, though, to speak of an entire book as a sign. Butnothing speaks against that. Linguists mostly study only signs that consist of justone sentence. And this is what we shall do here, too. However, texts are certainlymore than a sequence of sentences, and the study of discourse (which includestexts and dialogs) is certainly a very vital one. Unfortunately, even sentences areso complicated that it will take all our time to study them. The methods, however,shall be useful for discourse analysis as well.In linguistics, language signs are constituted of four different levels, not justtwo: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Semantics deals withthe meanings (what is signified), while the other three are all concerned with theexponent. At the lowest level we find that everything is composed from a smallset of sounds, or—when we write—of letters. (Chinese is exceptional in that thealphabet consists of around 50,000 ‘letters’, but each sign stands for a syllable—asequence of sounds, not just a single one.) With some exceptions (for exampletone and intonation) every utterance can be seen as a sequence of sounds. Forexample, /dog/ consists of three letters (and three sounds): /d/, /o/ and /g/. Inorder not to confuse sounds (and sound sequences) with letters we denote thesounds by enclosing them in square brackets. So, the sounds that make up [dog]are [d], [o] and [g], in that order. What is important to note here is that soundsby themselves in general have no meaning. The decomposition into sounds hasno counterpart in the semantics. Just as every signifier can be decomposed intosounds, it can also be decomposed into words. In written language we can spot thewords by looking for minimal parts of texts enclosed by blanks (or punctuationmarks). In spoken language the definition of word becomes very tricky. Thepart of linguistics that deals with how words are put together into sentences iscalled syntax. On the other hand, words are not the smallest meaningful units of

Lecture 1: Introduction5language. For example, /dogs/ is the plural of /dog/ and as such it is formed bya regular process, and if we only know the meaning of /dog/ we also know themeaning of /dogs/. Thus, we can decompose /dogs/ into two parts: /dog/ and /s/.The minimal parts of speech that bear meaning are called morphemes. Often, itis tacitly assumed that a morpheme is a part of a word; bigger chunks are calledidioms. Idioms are /kick the bucket/, /keep taps on someone/, and so on.The reason for this division is that while idioms are intransparent as far as theirmeaning is concerned (if you die you do not literally kick a bucket), syntacticallythey often behave as if they are made from words (for example, they inflect: /Johnkicked the bucket/).So, a word such as ‘dogs’ has four manifestations: its meaning, its soundstructure, its morphological structure and its syntactic structure. The levels ofmanifestation are also called strata. (Some use the term level of representation.) We use the following notation: the sign is given by enclosing the string inbrackets: ‘dog’. [dog]P denotes its phonological structure, [dog] M its morphological structure, [dog]L its syntactic structure and [dog]S its semantical structure. Ialso use typewriter font for symbols in print. For the most part we analyse language as written language, unless otherwise indicated. With that in mind, we have[dog]P /dog/. The latter is a string composed from three symbols, /d/, /o/ and/g/. So, ‘dog’ refers to the sign whose exponent is written here /dog/. We shallagree on the following.Definition 1 A sign is a quadruple hπ, µ, λ, σi, where π is its exponent (or phonological structure), µ its morphological structure, λ its syntactic structure and σits meaning (or semantic structure).We write signs vertically, in the following way.(1) σ λ µ πThis definition should not be taken as saying something deep. It merely fixes thenotion of a linguistic sign, saying that it consists of nothing more (and nothingless) than four things: its phonological structure, its morphological structure, itssyntactic structure and its semantic structure. Moreover, in the literature there are

Lecture 1: Introduction6numerous different definitions of signs. You should not worry too much here: thepresent definition is valid throughout this book only. Other definitions have othermerits.The power of language to generate so many signs comes from the fact that ithas rules by which complex signs are made from simpler ones.(2)Cars are cheaper this year.In (2), we have a sentence composed from 5 words. The meaning of each word isenough to understand the meaning of (2). Exactly how this is possible is one question that linguistics has to answer. (This example requires quite a lot of machineryto be solved explicitly!) We shall illustrate the approach taken in this course. Weassume that there is a binary operation , called merge, which takes two signsand forms a new sign. operates on each of the strata (or levels of manifestation)independently. This means that there are four distinct operations, P , M , L , andS , which simultaneously work together as follows.(3) σ1 σ2 λ λ 1 2 µ1 µ2 π1π2σ1λ1µ1π1SLMPσ2λ2µ2π2 Definition 2 A language is a set of signs. A grammar consists of a set of signs(called lexicon) together with a finite set of functions that each operate on signs.Typically, though not necessarily, the grammars that linguists design for naturallanguages consist in the lexicon plus a single binary operation of merge. Theremay also be additional operations (such as movement), but let’s assume for themoment that this is not so. Such a grammar is said to generate the followinglanguage ( set of signs) L:À Each member of the lexicon is in L.Á If S and S 0 are in L, then so is S S 0 . Nothing else is in L.

Lecture 1: Introduction7(Can you guess what a general definition would look like?) We shall now givea glimpse of how the various representations look like and what these operationsare. It will take the entire course (and much more) to understand the preciseconsequences of Definitions 1 and 2 and the idea that operations are defined oneach stratum independently. But it is a very useful one in that it forces us to beclear and concise. Everything has to be written into one of the representations inorder to have an effect on the way in which signs combine and what the effect ofcombination is.For example, P is typically concatenation, with a blank added. Let us represent strings by x, y etc., and concatenation by a . So,(4)(5)daca xy dacxyadfa 2a xy adf xyNotice that visually, 2 (‘blank’) is not represented at the end of a word. In computer books one often uses the symbol to represent the blank. (Clearly, thoughthe symbol is different from the blank!) Blank is a symbol (on a typewriter youhave to press space to get it. So, xa 2 is not the same as x! Now we have(6) xP y : xa 2a yFor example, the sign ‘this year’ is composed from the signs ‘this’ and ‘year’.And we have(7)this year [this year]P [this]PP[year]P thisa 2a yearThis, however, is valid only for words and only for written language. The composition of smaller units is different. No blank is inserted. For example, the sign‘car’ the plural sign ‘s’ (to give it a name) compose to give the sign with exponent /cars/, not /car s/. Moreover, the plural of /man/ is /men/, so it is not at allformed by adding /s/. We shall see below how this is dealt with.Morphology does not get to see the individual makeup of its units. In fact,the difference between ‘car’ and ‘cat’ is morphologically speaking as great as thatbetween ‘car’ and ‘moon’. Also, both are subject to the same morphological rulesand behave in the same way, for example form the plural by adding ‘s’. Thatmakes them belong to the same noun class. Still, they are counted as differentmorphemes. This is because they are manifested differently (the sound structure isdifferent). Therefore we distinguish between a morpheme and its morphological

8Lecture 1: Introductionstructure. The latter is only the portion that is needed on the morphologicalstratum to get everything right.Definition 3 A morpheme is an indecomposable si

Introduction to Linguistics Marcus Kracht Department of Linguistics, UCLA 3125 Campbell Hall 450 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90095–1543 kracht@humnet.ucla.edu