Contrast the Alexandrian and the Stoic approach to language.
The Alexandrian tended to be empiricists, which has to do with observation and classification of data, and the Stoics were rationalists, that related the function and structure of language with the function and structure of the human mind. At the end, Alexandrian’s view prevailed and satisfied the needs of language at that time.
How did the Roman grammarian Varro develop the notion of word classes?
Varro did not only follow the Greek model of word classes, but went further more. He divided the Greek lexicon into inflected (productive) and non-inflected (sterile) words. Furthermore, he classified the inflected words into four classes by reference to case and tense:
N+C-T
V+T-C
P+C+T
Ad-C-T
Explain what the terms Sandi and Sutra.
Sandi is a term for sounds that occur in rapid/normal speech.
Sutra is a set of rules, in Panini’s case giving information about word formation.
What did the Indians accomplish with linguistics?
They were apologists of the observation of the context to better understand linguistics. Semantics, grammar, phonology and phonetics were topics that occurred in Indian linguistics, that were much more advanced in comparison to Europe.
How did the Greeks develop the notion of word classes?
Stoics developed Plato’s and Aristotle’s study of four word classes then five word classes, while the Alexandrians had eight word classes: noun, verb, participle, pronoun, preposition, adverb and conjunction.
Who was the first linguist?
Panini (Sanskrit grammarian)
How does the work of Johann Christoph Adelung illustrate the progress made in the 19th Century?
Adelung tried to organise languages according to genetic relation, but geographical proximity of language was more important at the time.
What nationality dominated in the 19th Century?
It was the German nationality because of the unification/relationship between language and national identity.
What was the problem of Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm’s Law?
Grimm’s Law tells us that sound changes are systematic and not sporadic. The problem is that this was said before by Rask, Grimm only translated it.
What was the importance of August Schleicher in linguistics?
Schleicher develops the genealogical tree model that makes us understand how languages developed and evolved. Also based on Darwin’s ideas of survival, he tells us that languages are like natural organisms: they grow, mature and die.
How did dialect studies undermind the neogrammarian’s position?
According to the neogrammarians, sound changes are regular, they always occur the same way with a regular frequency, but dialect contact makes sound changes unpredictable.
What did the West learn from China?
Chinese is an isolated language; a tone language with an idiographic writing.
Lexical items (words that can be defined)
Function words (don’t have fixed meaning)
What is Karl Verner’s Law and how did it contribute to the neogrammarian’s position?
Verner says that there must be an explanation to the exception of a rule. Neogrammarians don’t agree with this because for them there are only laws and no exceptions.
Present the modern objections to the genealogical tree model.
Modern linguists objected that dialects come in the latest stage, what seems to make them really recent, which is not true.
What was the importance of Van Name in linguistics?
Van Name compared all four lexical bases found in the Caribbean: French, Spanish, English and Dutch.
What was the importance of Hugo Schuchardt in linguistics?
Schuchardt compares the universalist point of view of Francisco Adolfo Coelho, which considered that the features of Creole languages are due to universal tendencies in second language learning by adults, with the substratist point of view of Adam that believes Creoles are based on languages spoken by those with less power.
What did the neogrammarians like in Ferdinand de Saussure’s article: “The Earliest System of Vowels”?
Saussure said that when a certain sound occurs next to a vowel, it is pronounced like a glide. Liquids, glides and nasals are then pronounced like consonants when they come after consonants, and like vowels when they come before vowels. Neogrammarians didn’t like irregularity.
“Cours de Linguistique Generale”, broad on scope, why?
Saussure realised he was far ahead from the other linguistics.
What is the relationship between Thought and Speech?
They are inseparable. Language is where sound and thought meet. One can not exist without the other.
How did Saussure describe the Sign?
It is made up of two contents: word and meaning.
What is the basic principle of structuralism?
It is the opposition/contrast. Contrasting basic terms used in a discipline to clarify their position in a larger scale.
Explain Saussure’s opposition of “langue” and “parole”.
Langue is the knowledge of a community (shared knowledge).
Parole is the individual use of that knowledge, which can be used differently, depending on the different conditions of life (different speech of the rich and the poor, etc.).
Why according to Saussure there has to be a distinction between synchronic and diachronic?
The sign depends on the system, so according to different systems, signs have different meanings.
How did Saussure change the focus of 20th Century linguistics?
He focused linguistics on synchronic states, not on diachronic sequences as usual.
What analogy did Saussure make on synchronic and diachronic states?
He says that someone who comes in the middle of a chess game is not in disadvantage when compared to the other who was already there because he gets the most important, the present moment.
Explain the importance of the University of Paris in linguistics.
Speculative grammars wanted to turn grammar into scientific methods, by this, they thought they could define word classes and that would be applicable to every language. They failed because you can not start by word classes but by phrases, more complex structures.
Explain the importance of the Renaissance in linguistics.
Opening up of the entire Europe; countries/areas come in contact and learn a lot of new things about other cultures; belief that all languages are different but none are better than the other; printing press is created and it makes people have more access to publications.
Explain the importance of the Port Royal School in linguistics.
They wanted to find out what was universal in all languages; they explained three levels of the human mind: conceiving; judging and reasoning; they succeeded but speculative grammars didn’t.
According to Joseph Scaliger, what are the four families of languages?
Romance (Deus); Germanic (Gott); Greek (Theos); Slavic (Bog)
Define the following terms:
Pidgin: Reduced language that results from extended contact between groups of people with no language in common. It develops when some means of common are necessary. (no native speakers; not a natural language; a language that emerges when two groups of people with no language in common have to find out a way of communicating).
Jargon: Simplified and reduced language based on an “ad-hoc” basis.
Koinezation: When languages in contact are closely related.
Creole: Has a jargon or a pidgin in its ancestry, it is spoken natively by an entire speech community, usually one whose ancestors were displaced geographically so that their ties with their language were partly broken. (Have native speakers; it is a natural language)
What was the first English based Creole?
Sranan, spoken in Surinan
What was the first Portuguese based Creole?
Malayo-Portuguese
What was the oldest record of Creole language?
Creole-French
What was the first Creole really studied by linguists?
Creole-Dutch
What was the earliest recorded Pidgin?
Pidgin-Arabic (spoken in Mauritania)
What are the three types of languages? Briefly explain each.
Isolating
Inflected
Agglutinated
What was Sir William Jones’ important discovery?
He discovered a historical relationship between Sanskrit and Latin, Greek and German.
What did Wilkins want to do to end war?
Create a universal language.
Explain the meaning of Lingua Franca.
Lingua Franca came upon with the Crusades; it was lexically based on the southern romance languages (Italian, etc.). It has two meanings: lexically based language in the southern romance languages and the language spoken between people with no other language in common, as if it was universal. E.g.: French: Lingua Franca of diplomacy; English is today’s universal language.
Explain the importance of William Greenfield in Creole studies.
He compared the grammar between Creole English and English, as well as, Creole Dutch and Dutch.
What important concept did Dirk Christiaan Hesseling introduce on his 1897 article on the origin of Afrikaans?
Netherlands had colonized South Africa (Dutch came to be known in South Africa). They needed slaves in South Africa and took them from Indonesia to South Africa. This made contact between Dutch and Malayo Portuguese (spoken in Indonesia). Hesseling introduced the concept of partial creolization.
How did John Reinecke’s doctorial dissertation change the study of Creole languages?
We have to study the social circumstances of languages.
Sociolinguistics: relationship between social setting and linguistic development.
Why was the phoneticians “Goal of one sound, one symbol” unattainable/unreachable?
It was unreachable because it led to too many symbols which were hard to remember. It was a very complicated system.
What solution did Henry Sweet (1877) suggest for the above problem?
Sweet with his “handbook of phonetics” made a distinction between sounds that depend on the environment (phones), and sounds that trigger a meaning itself (phonemes).
Why is Saussure’s usage of the terms:
Phoneme: phonetic segment
Phonologie: synchronic phonetics
Phonetique: diachronic evolution of sound
Confusing to the modern reader?
These terms were confusing for the modern reader because they had different terms.
How did Baudouin de Courtenay and Kruts use the terms:
Antrapophonics: analysis of sounds from an accustic point of view.
Psychophonetics: how people feel about what they hear.
How did Courtenay (1895) define the phoneme?
Phoneme: psychological equivalent of speech sound.
What group did Roman Osipovich Jakobson, Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy, and Kurts form in 1915?
The Moscow Linguistic Circle
Which earlier linguists influence the Moscow Linguistic Circle?
Saussure and Baudouin de Courtenay
What group did the three form ten years later?
The Linguistic Circle of Prague
What did Jakobson say as the task of phonology?
1st: He identified each language according to their phoneme.
2nd: He identified distinctive features to formulate general laws.
3rd: He identified historical change in phonological systems.
4th: He supported the acoustic basis rather then the articulatory basis.
How did Trubetzkoy distinguish between constant and suspensible oppositions of phonemes?
Constant: can occur in any environment. (P/b)
Suspensible: neutralized in certain environments. (Bund; Bunt)
How did Trubetzkoy and Jakobson disagree about the fundamental units of phonology?
For Trubetzkoy phonemes are the fundamental units of phonology, but for Jakobson the features are the fundamental units.
How did Jakobson use binarity to describe choices that are in fact multiple?
He tries to reduce everything to yes/no questions. Basically he reduces to +/- choices. (high vowels=+ high – low)
What is meant by Jakobson’s “one mouth” principle?
He meant the use of the same features for both vowels and consonants.
How did Jakobson relate child language acquisition aphasia and phonological universal?
The last sound a child learns are the first ones he/she looses.
How did Jakobson and the Prague School, in general differ from American descriptivists around 1950?
The Prague school was looking for theories and explanations, while Jakobson was more interested in other items.
Briefly contrast British versus the Continental European attitudes towards linguistics.
The British are insularity; they focus only on the British territory and emphasis on pragmatism rather than on the principal. The European concentrates on theory and practice of many languages.
What distinction did Henry Sweet between Narrow Romic and Broad Romic?
Narrow Romic (phonetic): present, as accurate as possible, all relevant facts to the production of sound; applicable to all languages.
Broad Romic (phonemic): particular to certain languages; only indicates distinctions of sounds which correspond to distinction of meaning.
What practical skills did Daniel Jones stress in the training of phoneticians?
Perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing.
What was the crisis in the phonological theory in the 1930’s?
It was difficult to perceive what a phoneme is, it was seen as a segment, but a segment could be either a vowel or a consonant. It is more complex: it has to do with juncture (the way they appear in words).
What distinction did Firth make between Phonematic Units and Prosody?
Phonematic Units: old segmental phonemes.
Prosody: elements capable of extension.
What two traditions of linguistic studies develop in the USA in the 19th Century?
The European tradition: students would go to Germany to study Whitney.
Non-linguistic tradition: the Indian languages were learned.
Who was the first American linguistic of distinction? Explain the subject of his work that received international recognition.
William Whitney. He focused in Sanskrit studies.
Why was Franz Boas a self-taught linguist?
Franz Boas got a PHD in geography, so in what concerned linguistics was the fact he had to go to the field and learn everything by himself.
What was Boas’ view of “primitive languages”?
Primitive languages are believed to be vague and instable, but it is not true according to Boas. He says sometimes people can’t speak languages properly and this is what leads to the misunderstandment.
What did Boas mean when he said that language was a “window on culture”?
When studying a culture, learning its language is a major help and source. There is an intrinsic relationship between language and culture. People are usually more conscious about their culture than their language.
Why did Boas prefer phonetic to phonemic transcription?
He preferred phonetic transcription because he was not a native speaker. He corrected the phonemic spelling to phonetic and told his students to do the same. Phonetic is easier for non-native speakers.
Describe the tradition that Boas established in American linguistics.
Descriptivist tradition: setting up procedures for analysing language; emphasis on the discovery procedures (specifying the operation). This tradition helps field workers.
What were Sapir’s principal contributions to linguistics?
He was interested in the psychological foundation of language.
What were Sapir’s views towards the relationship of Language and Thought?
Language shapes our perception of the world around us.
Sapir’s 1921 book discusses the system for classifying Language. What did he mean by the following terms:
Isolating: each concept is expressed in a separate word.
Agglutinating: distinct concepts are expressed by distinct non-overlapping parts of words.
Fusional
Symbolic
Briefly contrast the careers of Sapir and Bloomfield and their contributions to linguistic studies.
They were rivals because Sapir operated more on intuitions and insights, while Bloomfield worked on systematic investigating, collecting data first and then comes ups with a theory.
How did Daniel Jones deal with the suprasegmentals?
He just ignored them.
What was the logical positivist/behaviourist approach that influenced the way that Bloomfield tries to make linguistics more scientific?
This approach rejects introspection. There are only two kinds of meaningful utterances: either a logical preposition or a report of sense data. This approach reduces linguistics to more scientific methods – observation, collecting data and proving it. It only approves what can be proved.
What were the good and bad sides of logical positivism/behaviourism?
The bad side is that we also need insights, they can’t simply be rejected, and they just need to be proved. The good side is that both wanted to put emphasis on matters that could be proved and not single opinions. Interpersonally provable and not single opinions.
Why was Bloomfield’s behaviourist approach to semantics unsatisfactory?
People usually talk about things they are not seeing - “displaced speech”. Bloomfield didn’t take this into account, he tried to correct this failure with the term “displaced speech” (talking about things, which can’t be directly observed at the moment of conversation).
How did Robert Hall and Douglas Taylor disagree about the genetic affiliation of Creole Languages?
Hall classified creoles as dialects of their European lexical source languages; Taylor classified creoles as genetically distinct from the source language.
What was the Theory of Monogenesis?
This theory defended that many of the world’s pidgins and creoles could be traced to a common origin. (Relaxification: translation of word for word, from one language to another).
Describe the Decamp’s Model of the Creole Continuum.
Decamp first applied the word continuum to the gradation from the lexical source language (acrolet) to the Creole (basilect). In between we have the mesolect, with the abolition of slavery (for example in Jamaica), people tried to establish their varieties.
What is the relevance of the Continum Model to the history of American Black English?
There was the assumption that a certain variety, a Creole by contrast with other varieties can develop till it at last comes in contact with a major language (in the case of English) and becomes similar to it (American Black English). “Sranan – Jamaican English – American Black English”
What basic structuralist assumption did Chomsky, Halle and Lukoff violate in the 1956 paper on Accent and Juncture in English?
They violated the prohibition against mixing levels: This book reduced the four degrees of phonemic stress to one simple accented/unaccented distinction. This established a nonbiunique relation between phonemics and phonetics. Eg: English Teacher – if you stress that he is English, you stress English; if yu stress that he is a Teacher, you stress he is a Teacher.
What was Chomsky’s first contact with transformational syntax?
Zelling Harris: He proof read a book of Harris and introduced himself to syntax (structural relationships between sentences).
What two factors made Chomsky’s syntactic structures revolutionary?
He puts the syntax at the center of the theory, and before him, the center used to be phonology or morphology. This is quite revolutionary because before language was considered a more human attribute, and therefore difficult to study it scientifically.
What kind of grammar did Chomsky argue for in syntactic structures?
The finite state Grammar and the prose structure Grammar.
What distinction did Chomsky make between weak and strong Genetive Capacity?
If grammar has the capacity to generate all and only the sentences of a language, it is of strong generative capacity- If a grammar doesn’t have this capacity and is of no empirical interest, then it has a weak genetive capacity.
The Alexandrian tended to be empiricists, which has to do with observation and classification of data, and the Stoics were rationalists, that related the function and structure of language with the function and structure of the human mind. At the end, Alexandrian’s view prevailed and satisfied the needs of language at that time.
How did the Roman grammarian Varro develop the notion of word classes?
Varro did not only follow the Greek model of word classes, but went further more. He divided the Greek lexicon into inflected (productive) and non-inflected (sterile) words. Furthermore, he classified the inflected words into four classes by reference to case and tense:
N+C-T
V+T-C
P+C+T
Ad-C-T
Explain what the terms Sandi and Sutra.
Sandi is a term for sounds that occur in rapid/normal speech.
Sutra is a set of rules, in Panini’s case giving information about word formation.
What did the Indians accomplish with linguistics?
They were apologists of the observation of the context to better understand linguistics. Semantics, grammar, phonology and phonetics were topics that occurred in Indian linguistics, that were much more advanced in comparison to Europe.
How did the Greeks develop the notion of word classes?
Stoics developed Plato’s and Aristotle’s study of four word classes then five word classes, while the Alexandrians had eight word classes: noun, verb, participle, pronoun, preposition, adverb and conjunction.
Who was the first linguist?
Panini (Sanskrit grammarian)
How does the work of Johann Christoph Adelung illustrate the progress made in the 19th Century?
Adelung tried to organise languages according to genetic relation, but geographical proximity of language was more important at the time.
What nationality dominated in the 19th Century?
It was the German nationality because of the unification/relationship between language and national identity.
What was the problem of Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm’s Law?
Grimm’s Law tells us that sound changes are systematic and not sporadic. The problem is that this was said before by Rask, Grimm only translated it.
What was the importance of August Schleicher in linguistics?
Schleicher develops the genealogical tree model that makes us understand how languages developed and evolved. Also based on Darwin’s ideas of survival, he tells us that languages are like natural organisms: they grow, mature and die.
How did dialect studies undermind the neogrammarian’s position?
According to the neogrammarians, sound changes are regular, they always occur the same way with a regular frequency, but dialect contact makes sound changes unpredictable.
What did the West learn from China?
Chinese is an isolated language; a tone language with an idiographic writing.
Lexical items (words that can be defined)
Function words (don’t have fixed meaning)
What is Karl Verner’s Law and how did it contribute to the neogrammarian’s position?
Verner says that there must be an explanation to the exception of a rule. Neogrammarians don’t agree with this because for them there are only laws and no exceptions.
Present the modern objections to the genealogical tree model.
Modern linguists objected that dialects come in the latest stage, what seems to make them really recent, which is not true.
What was the importance of Van Name in linguistics?
Van Name compared all four lexical bases found in the Caribbean: French, Spanish, English and Dutch.
What was the importance of Hugo Schuchardt in linguistics?
Schuchardt compares the universalist point of view of Francisco Adolfo Coelho, which considered that the features of Creole languages are due to universal tendencies in second language learning by adults, with the substratist point of view of Adam that believes Creoles are based on languages spoken by those with less power.
What did the neogrammarians like in Ferdinand de Saussure’s article: “The Earliest System of Vowels”?
Saussure said that when a certain sound occurs next to a vowel, it is pronounced like a glide. Liquids, glides and nasals are then pronounced like consonants when they come after consonants, and like vowels when they come before vowels. Neogrammarians didn’t like irregularity.
“Cours de Linguistique Generale”, broad on scope, why?
Saussure realised he was far ahead from the other linguistics.
What is the relationship between Thought and Speech?
They are inseparable. Language is where sound and thought meet. One can not exist without the other.
How did Saussure describe the Sign?
It is made up of two contents: word and meaning.
What is the basic principle of structuralism?
It is the opposition/contrast. Contrasting basic terms used in a discipline to clarify their position in a larger scale.
Explain Saussure’s opposition of “langue” and “parole”.
Langue is the knowledge of a community (shared knowledge).
Parole is the individual use of that knowledge, which can be used differently, depending on the different conditions of life (different speech of the rich and the poor, etc.).
Why according to Saussure there has to be a distinction between synchronic and diachronic?
The sign depends on the system, so according to different systems, signs have different meanings.
How did Saussure change the focus of 20th Century linguistics?
He focused linguistics on synchronic states, not on diachronic sequences as usual.
What analogy did Saussure make on synchronic and diachronic states?
He says that someone who comes in the middle of a chess game is not in disadvantage when compared to the other who was already there because he gets the most important, the present moment.
Explain the importance of the University of Paris in linguistics.
Speculative grammars wanted to turn grammar into scientific methods, by this, they thought they could define word classes and that would be applicable to every language. They failed because you can not start by word classes but by phrases, more complex structures.
Explain the importance of the Renaissance in linguistics.
Opening up of the entire Europe; countries/areas come in contact and learn a lot of new things about other cultures; belief that all languages are different but none are better than the other; printing press is created and it makes people have more access to publications.
Explain the importance of the Port Royal School in linguistics.
They wanted to find out what was universal in all languages; they explained three levels of the human mind: conceiving; judging and reasoning; they succeeded but speculative grammars didn’t.
According to Joseph Scaliger, what are the four families of languages?
Romance (Deus); Germanic (Gott); Greek (Theos); Slavic (Bog)
Define the following terms:
Pidgin: Reduced language that results from extended contact between groups of people with no language in common. It develops when some means of common are necessary. (no native speakers; not a natural language; a language that emerges when two groups of people with no language in common have to find out a way of communicating).
Jargon: Simplified and reduced language based on an “ad-hoc” basis.
Koinezation: When languages in contact are closely related.
Creole: Has a jargon or a pidgin in its ancestry, it is spoken natively by an entire speech community, usually one whose ancestors were displaced geographically so that their ties with their language were partly broken. (Have native speakers; it is a natural language)
What was the first English based Creole?
Sranan, spoken in Surinan
What was the first Portuguese based Creole?
Malayo-Portuguese
What was the oldest record of Creole language?
Creole-French
What was the first Creole really studied by linguists?
Creole-Dutch
What was the earliest recorded Pidgin?
Pidgin-Arabic (spoken in Mauritania)
What are the three types of languages? Briefly explain each.
Isolating
Inflected
Agglutinated
What was Sir William Jones’ important discovery?
He discovered a historical relationship between Sanskrit and Latin, Greek and German.
What did Wilkins want to do to end war?
Create a universal language.
Explain the meaning of Lingua Franca.
Lingua Franca came upon with the Crusades; it was lexically based on the southern romance languages (Italian, etc.). It has two meanings: lexically based language in the southern romance languages and the language spoken between people with no other language in common, as if it was universal. E.g.: French: Lingua Franca of diplomacy; English is today’s universal language.
Explain the importance of William Greenfield in Creole studies.
He compared the grammar between Creole English and English, as well as, Creole Dutch and Dutch.
What important concept did Dirk Christiaan Hesseling introduce on his 1897 article on the origin of Afrikaans?
Netherlands had colonized South Africa (Dutch came to be known in South Africa). They needed slaves in South Africa and took them from Indonesia to South Africa. This made contact between Dutch and Malayo Portuguese (spoken in Indonesia). Hesseling introduced the concept of partial creolization.
How did John Reinecke’s doctorial dissertation change the study of Creole languages?
We have to study the social circumstances of languages.
Sociolinguistics: relationship between social setting and linguistic development.
Why was the phoneticians “Goal of one sound, one symbol” unattainable/unreachable?
It was unreachable because it led to too many symbols which were hard to remember. It was a very complicated system.
What solution did Henry Sweet (1877) suggest for the above problem?
Sweet with his “handbook of phonetics” made a distinction between sounds that depend on the environment (phones), and sounds that trigger a meaning itself (phonemes).
Why is Saussure’s usage of the terms:
Phoneme: phonetic segment
Phonologie: synchronic phonetics
Phonetique: diachronic evolution of sound
Confusing to the modern reader?
These terms were confusing for the modern reader because they had different terms.
How did Baudouin de Courtenay and Kruts use the terms:
Antrapophonics: analysis of sounds from an accustic point of view.
Psychophonetics: how people feel about what they hear.
How did Courtenay (1895) define the phoneme?
Phoneme: psychological equivalent of speech sound.
What group did Roman Osipovich Jakobson, Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy, and Kurts form in 1915?
The Moscow Linguistic Circle
Which earlier linguists influence the Moscow Linguistic Circle?
Saussure and Baudouin de Courtenay
What group did the three form ten years later?
The Linguistic Circle of Prague
What did Jakobson say as the task of phonology?
1st: He identified each language according to their phoneme.
2nd: He identified distinctive features to formulate general laws.
3rd: He identified historical change in phonological systems.
4th: He supported the acoustic basis rather then the articulatory basis.
How did Trubetzkoy distinguish between constant and suspensible oppositions of phonemes?
Constant: can occur in any environment. (P/b)
Suspensible: neutralized in certain environments. (Bund; Bunt)
How did Trubetzkoy and Jakobson disagree about the fundamental units of phonology?
For Trubetzkoy phonemes are the fundamental units of phonology, but for Jakobson the features are the fundamental units.
How did Jakobson use binarity to describe choices that are in fact multiple?
He tries to reduce everything to yes/no questions. Basically he reduces to +/- choices. (high vowels=+ high – low)
What is meant by Jakobson’s “one mouth” principle?
He meant the use of the same features for both vowels and consonants.
How did Jakobson relate child language acquisition aphasia and phonological universal?
The last sound a child learns are the first ones he/she looses.
How did Jakobson and the Prague School, in general differ from American descriptivists around 1950?
The Prague school was looking for theories and explanations, while Jakobson was more interested in other items.
Briefly contrast British versus the Continental European attitudes towards linguistics.
The British are insularity; they focus only on the British territory and emphasis on pragmatism rather than on the principal. The European concentrates on theory and practice of many languages.
What distinction did Henry Sweet between Narrow Romic and Broad Romic?
Narrow Romic (phonetic): present, as accurate as possible, all relevant facts to the production of sound; applicable to all languages.
Broad Romic (phonemic): particular to certain languages; only indicates distinctions of sounds which correspond to distinction of meaning.
What practical skills did Daniel Jones stress in the training of phoneticians?
Perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing.
What was the crisis in the phonological theory in the 1930’s?
It was difficult to perceive what a phoneme is, it was seen as a segment, but a segment could be either a vowel or a consonant. It is more complex: it has to do with juncture (the way they appear in words).
What distinction did Firth make between Phonematic Units and Prosody?
Phonematic Units: old segmental phonemes.
Prosody: elements capable of extension.
What two traditions of linguistic studies develop in the USA in the 19th Century?
The European tradition: students would go to Germany to study Whitney.
Non-linguistic tradition: the Indian languages were learned.
Who was the first American linguistic of distinction? Explain the subject of his work that received international recognition.
William Whitney. He focused in Sanskrit studies.
Why was Franz Boas a self-taught linguist?
Franz Boas got a PHD in geography, so in what concerned linguistics was the fact he had to go to the field and learn everything by himself.
What was Boas’ view of “primitive languages”?
Primitive languages are believed to be vague and instable, but it is not true according to Boas. He says sometimes people can’t speak languages properly and this is what leads to the misunderstandment.
What did Boas mean when he said that language was a “window on culture”?
When studying a culture, learning its language is a major help and source. There is an intrinsic relationship between language and culture. People are usually more conscious about their culture than their language.
Why did Boas prefer phonetic to phonemic transcription?
He preferred phonetic transcription because he was not a native speaker. He corrected the phonemic spelling to phonetic and told his students to do the same. Phonetic is easier for non-native speakers.
Describe the tradition that Boas established in American linguistics.
Descriptivist tradition: setting up procedures for analysing language; emphasis on the discovery procedures (specifying the operation). This tradition helps field workers.
What were Sapir’s principal contributions to linguistics?
He was interested in the psychological foundation of language.
What were Sapir’s views towards the relationship of Language and Thought?
Language shapes our perception of the world around us.
Sapir’s 1921 book discusses the system for classifying Language. What did he mean by the following terms:
Isolating: each concept is expressed in a separate word.
Agglutinating: distinct concepts are expressed by distinct non-overlapping parts of words.
Fusional
Symbolic
Briefly contrast the careers of Sapir and Bloomfield and their contributions to linguistic studies.
They were rivals because Sapir operated more on intuitions and insights, while Bloomfield worked on systematic investigating, collecting data first and then comes ups with a theory.
How did Daniel Jones deal with the suprasegmentals?
He just ignored them.
What was the logical positivist/behaviourist approach that influenced the way that Bloomfield tries to make linguistics more scientific?
This approach rejects introspection. There are only two kinds of meaningful utterances: either a logical preposition or a report of sense data. This approach reduces linguistics to more scientific methods – observation, collecting data and proving it. It only approves what can be proved.
What were the good and bad sides of logical positivism/behaviourism?
The bad side is that we also need insights, they can’t simply be rejected, and they just need to be proved. The good side is that both wanted to put emphasis on matters that could be proved and not single opinions. Interpersonally provable and not single opinions.
Why was Bloomfield’s behaviourist approach to semantics unsatisfactory?
People usually talk about things they are not seeing - “displaced speech”. Bloomfield didn’t take this into account, he tried to correct this failure with the term “displaced speech” (talking about things, which can’t be directly observed at the moment of conversation).
How did Robert Hall and Douglas Taylor disagree about the genetic affiliation of Creole Languages?
Hall classified creoles as dialects of their European lexical source languages; Taylor classified creoles as genetically distinct from the source language.
What was the Theory of Monogenesis?
This theory defended that many of the world’s pidgins and creoles could be traced to a common origin. (Relaxification: translation of word for word, from one language to another).
Describe the Decamp’s Model of the Creole Continuum.
Decamp first applied the word continuum to the gradation from the lexical source language (acrolet) to the Creole (basilect). In between we have the mesolect, with the abolition of slavery (for example in Jamaica), people tried to establish their varieties.
What is the relevance of the Continum Model to the history of American Black English?
There was the assumption that a certain variety, a Creole by contrast with other varieties can develop till it at last comes in contact with a major language (in the case of English) and becomes similar to it (American Black English). “Sranan – Jamaican English – American Black English”
What basic structuralist assumption did Chomsky, Halle and Lukoff violate in the 1956 paper on Accent and Juncture in English?
They violated the prohibition against mixing levels: This book reduced the four degrees of phonemic stress to one simple accented/unaccented distinction. This established a nonbiunique relation between phonemics and phonetics. Eg: English Teacher – if you stress that he is English, you stress English; if yu stress that he is a Teacher, you stress he is a Teacher.
What was Chomsky’s first contact with transformational syntax?
Zelling Harris: He proof read a book of Harris and introduced himself to syntax (structural relationships between sentences).
What two factors made Chomsky’s syntactic structures revolutionary?
He puts the syntax at the center of the theory, and before him, the center used to be phonology or morphology. This is quite revolutionary because before language was considered a more human attribute, and therefore difficult to study it scientifically.
What kind of grammar did Chomsky argue for in syntactic structures?
The finite state Grammar and the prose structure Grammar.
What distinction did Chomsky make between weak and strong Genetive Capacity?
If grammar has the capacity to generate all and only the sentences of a language, it is of strong generative capacity- If a grammar doesn’t have this capacity and is of no empirical interest, then it has a weak genetive capacity.
Dr. John Holm, English Linguistics 3 Course
Universidade de Coimbra
