Linguistics week 11

1
Linguistics week 11

• Finish assimilation start morphology

2
(No Transcript)
3
The IPA vowel chart

• This is a stylized representation of the inside
  of the mouth
• It shows
• the cardinal vowels
• marked by black dots
• and the approximate position of vowels common in
  many languages
• The next slide shows the position of English
  vowels on the same kind of chart

4
Economy of effort allophonic differences within
one syllable

• The vowels in ? and ? are different (front and
  back) because the speaker is preparing for the
  following consonant
• The consonants /k/ in kit and cat differ slightly
  because the speaker is preparing for the
  following vowel. Tongue position for the first is
  further forward
• Why do these allophonic differences exist?
• In language, as in life, people are lazy!
• It is logical that tongue movement should be
  minimized
• As long as people can understand what we are
  saying!

5
Economy of effort assimilation

• Another syllable or word influences
  pronunciation, in rapid speech
• How do you pronounce ???
• This is an example of progressive assimilation
• Cf Fromkin p305 on Akan language
• What about ???
• This is an example of elision
• Also ???
• Are there any other three syllable expressions
  that work like this

6
Assimilation in English and French

• Usually its regressive
• A phoneme is changed to accommodate (match) the
  next phoneme.
• Voicing
• Newspaper, of course, have to
• News has /z/ newspaper has s to accommodate
  the following /p/
• French avec /avek/ in avec vous /aveg vu/ with
  you

7
Assimilation and elision are important because

• We can understand better the idea of connected
  speech
• Sounds are not pronounced in isolation, but
  depend on their neighbors
• The distinction between phonemes and allophones
  becomes clearer
• Mandarin has a phoneme /b/ with allophones b
  and m
• And it has a phoneme /m/, realized as the phone
  m
• Our pronunciation of foreign languages becomes
  more natural and accurate

8
Morphology, then

• What is it?
• Its the study of word forms, and the changes we
  make to words
• Its part of the grammar of languages?
• What is the other important part?
• Some languages are morphologically more complex
  than others
• What guess could you make about languages which
  are not morphologically complex?

9
Words. How many words are there in this
utterance?

• She was a good cook as cooks go, and as cooks go,
  she went.
• That was easy. How did you determine the number?
• Now answer two further questions
• How many different word-forms are there?
• How many different lexemes are there?
• And another question
• What do you think lexeme means?
• Lexemes and word-forms are very like phonemes and
  allophones, actually.

10
Word segmentation

• In English, words are conveniently separated by
  white space, in writing
• This is not true of Chinese
• And it is not true of spoken English either
• If you know a language, you can separate the
  stream of continuous speech into words
• Adults who never learned to read are equally
  aware of words
• Words are sound meaning units
• Words (lexemes) are the units stored in
  dictionaries (and in your head)
• With their pronunciation, meaning, and
  morphological structure

11
Two kinds of words

• Function words
• Restricted in number
• A closed class
• Have a grammatical function
• Usually just one morpheme (a grammatical
  morpheme)
• Content words
• An open class
• New content words often come into use in every
  language
• Which words on this slide ? Chinese examples?

12
You think English is hard?

• Ha! When I was at school I had to do Latin
• See if you can find out what this is
• amo amamus
• amas amatis
• amat amant
• Or this
• annus anni
• anne anni
• annum annos
• anni annorum
• anno annis
• anno annis

13
They were Latin inflections

• That means
• The two lists each show the different word-forms,
  for a Latin noun or verb
• In English, inflection includes things like
• Number
• Tense
• BUT inflection does NOT allow for making a new
  lexeme
• So sleepy is not an inflection of sleep
• Write down 10 roots (like sleep)
• Give one or more inflected forms (eg sleeps) for
  each
• And one or more derived forms (like sleepy)

14
Inflectional morphology

• In English, inflection includes things like
• Number
• Tense
• BUT inflection does NOT allow for making a new
  lexeme
• so sleepy is not an inflection of sleep
• unkind is not an inflection of kind
• artistic is not an inflection of artist (which is
  not an inflection of art (Inflection and
  derivation task)

15
Inflectional vs derivational morphology

• Inflection does not change the word class
  (syntactic category, part-of-speech, ??)
• Derivation may or may not change word class
• Derivation makes a new lexeme
• create ? creative
• Inflection just changes the grammatical ending of
  the original lexeme
• create ? creates
• Inflection is productive
• You can add s to any verb, to make it plural
• Derivation is not necessarily productive
• You cannot always add un- to an adjective, or
  -ive to a verb

16
Roots and affixes

• Unbelievable contains
• One free morpheme
• A root and two affixes
• One prefix and one suffix
• In English, there are derivational prefixes and
  suffixes
• There are no inflectional prefixes
• Suffixes are more common in the worlds languages
• But Thai has only prefixes no suffixes
• Plural in the Zapotec language is realized by a
  prefix, not a suffix

17
Infixes

• In Tagalog
• sulat write
• sumulat wrote
• sinulat was written
• What is the root morpheme here?
• What are the affixes?
• Yule describes a kind of infix used in English
• I dont want to go to uni-bloody-versity
• Is there any infixing in Mandarin, do you think?

18
Reduplication

• Afrikaans
• dik thick dikdik very thick
• Motu (Papua New Guinea)
• mero boy memero boys
• meromero little boy
• How do you say little boys in this language?
• And you guessed it what uses does
  reduplication have in Mandarin?

19
Reading

• Read Chapter 7
• Answer the Study Questions
• Dont look at page 255 until you have finished!