Introduction to Linguistics

BASLP 2024
The Scope of Linguistics
● To describe and trace the history of all observable
language
● To determine the forces that are permanently and
universally at work in all languages
● To deduce the general laws to which all specific
historical phenomena can be reduced
● To delimit and define itself
Object of Linguistics
● The linguistic phenomenon always has two related sides,
each deriving its values from the other.
○ We simply cannot reduce language to sound or detach sound
from oral articulation
○ we cannot define the movements of the vocal organs without
taking into account the acoustical impression
● A sound, a complex acoustical-vocal unit, combines in turn
with an idea to form a complex
physical-physiological-psychological unit.
● Does sound constitute speech?
● Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we
cannot think of one without the other.
● Speech always implies both an established system and an
evolution.
Presence of Language in the facts of Speech
● We must examine the individual act from which the
speaking-circuit can be reconstructed.
● The act requires the presence of at least two persons.
● A conversation consist of -

Psychological
Concepts
Physiological
Sound-image
Physical
● The speech-circuit can be divided into:
○ An outer part and An inner part
○ Psychological and Non-psychological
○ Active and Passive part
○ Executive (c - s)and Receptive (s - c)
Necessary Assumptions
● Langue (Language): It is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a
collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to
permit individuals to exercise that faculty.
● Langage (Speech): An essential and definite part of language.
● Parole (Speaking): Execution of language. Execution part is always
individual (individual within collective).
Distinction between Langue and Parole
Langue Parole

● Social ● Individual
● Essential ● Accessory/ more or less
● Not a function of the accidental
speaker ● Consists of
○ The combinations by which the
● Passively assimilated by the
speaker uses the language code for
speaker expressing his own thought
○ The psychological mechanism that
allow speaker to express
Characteristics of Langue (Language)
● Language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of
speech facts.
● It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can
never create nor modify it by himself.
● It exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the
members of a community.
● It is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the
union of meanings and sound-images.
● Language is concrete, no less so than speaking.
● Linguistic signs, though basically psychological, are not
abstractions.
The Semiotic point of view of Language/ Design
Features of Language
● Arbitrariness: Connection between linguistic form and meaning is
arbitrary.
● Duality: Human language organized in two levels simultaneously.
● Discreteness: Linguistic representations can be broken down into small
discrete units which combine with each other in rule-governed ways
● Productivity: Continuous production and manipulation of linguistic
resources.
● Displacement: Referring different aspects of time through language.
● Cultural Transmission: The process where a language is passed on from one
generation to the next, is cultural transmission.
Approaches and Dichotomies to study Language
● Synchronic and Diachronic
● Descriptive and Prescriptive
● Theoretical and Applied
● Microlinguistics and Macrolinguistics
Structure of Language/ Analysis of Language
● Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Relationship

Syntagmatic
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Phonetics
Phonetics can be divided into three study areas:

● Articulatory phonetics
● Acoustic phonetics
● Auditory phonetics
Articulatory Phonetics
● Larynx

Speech production and Larynx

● Vocal cords
Vocal cords vibration
Speech Production Apparatus
● Lips (Labial)
● Teeth (Dental)
● Alveolar ridge
● Palate
● Velum
● Uvula
● Pharynx
● Larynx
● Tongue - tip, blade, body, root
IPA
International Phonetic Alphabet

Place of Articulation

Manner of
Articulation
Manner of Articulation - Consonants
● Plosive or Stop:
● Nasal:
● Fricative:
● Affricate:
● Approximant:
● Tap or Flap:
● Trill:
Fricative
Plosive
Manner of Articulation - Vowels
● Frontness: arching of tongue, horizontal dimension
○ Front
○ Center
○ Back
● Height: moving tongue body up and down, vertical dimension
○ High
○ Mid
○ Low
● Lip rounding: shape of lips
○ Rounded
○ Unrounded

Production of Vowel
IPA Transcription
IPA for English Consonants
IPA for English Vowels

IPA & manner of

Vowels
IPA for Bengali
Practice Set - IPA
IPA Practice
IPA Listen and Practice

Attempt Yourself
Exercise
Exercise 1
Phonology
● Phonology is concerned with the sound of a language.
● Phonology deals with the function, behaviour and organization of
sound.
● Phoneme:
○ Phoneme is the set of smallest sound unit in a language that can
convey a distinct meaning. E.g: /p/, /k/, /b/ etc.
○ A single mental category - abstract
○ Which are in contrastive distribution.
● Allophone:
○ Phone(s) which are in complementary distribution and represent(s) a
single phoneme. E.g.: /p/ and /pʰ/ in English
○ Allphone(s) is the realization of phoneme in actual utterance.
Distribution
● The range of places within a word which a given sound may occur in is
called its distribution.
● Complimentary: mutually exclusive; cannot occur in the same place.
● Contrastive distribution:
○ The difference between the two sounds is said to be semantically
contrastive.
○ Can occur in a same place, but with change of meaning.

●
● Minimal Pair:
○ The forms contrast in one segment only.
○ E.G:
Exercise: write phonological rules
Binary/Distinctive Feature Theory
● Roman Jakobson (1951) – Preliminaries to
Speech Analysis
● Jakobsonian distinctive binary feature
theory/ distinctive feature theory
● The basis of phonology is a relatively small set of
distinctive features, utilized by all languages in the
construction of oppositions.
Binary Features
● A broad categorization can be made between consonants and vowels.
● Then a categorization can be made between the sounds which can syllabify or
not. [syllabic/ non-syllabic]
● A subclass of consonants are obstruent and sonorant - based on the obstruction
created in course of production.
● To make a distinction within the class of obstruent - we consider the class of
continuent.
● Continuent represents the differences of the airflow.
● To make the distinction between stop and affricates - we must have the feature
which represent how we release the airflow. [delayed release/not delayed
release]
● Based on the noise created by the affricates and fricatives we can form a feature
called strident.
● The whole place of articulation can broadly be divided into two regions: front
region from the post-alveolar and behind part from it.
● The feature is anterior.
● Another class feature can be made by the position of active articulator (blade of
the tongue).
● The position or closure made by the blade of the tongue referred as coronal
feature.
● Tongue body features
○ High
○ Low
○ Back
● Lip shape feature
○ Roundness
● Advanced Tongue Root (ATR)
○ Moving the base or root of the tongue forwarded.
Phonological Processes
● Regressive: If the direction of assimilation is leftward, that is,
the preceding sound acquires the features of the following
sound, the process is regressive assimilation. Consider the
Bengali language
Vowel Harmony
● A well-known type of assimilation is Vowel Harmony. It involves
assimilation of features between vowels at a distance.
● This assimilatory process operates in multisyllabic words.
It affects unstressed vowels, which are assimilated to the
vowel within the word that receives the primary stress.
Consider the following -
● The word water is made up of two syllables: /ˈwɔ/ and /tə/.
● The first syllable receives the primary stress and
the second syllable is unstressed

water /ˈwɔtə/→ /wɔtɔ/

● Dissimilation: Dissimilation takes place when a sound is modified so
that it differs from a neighboring sound in some property.
●
● Haplology: Haplology is a phonological process when an
entire syllable is deleted within a word, specifically where
two neighboring similar syllables are present.
● E.G.:
Haplology → haplogy
morphophonology → morphonology
urine analysis → urinalysis
● Epenthesis: Insertion of a sound segment in a word is a common
phonological process. In case of this process the place of insertion is
important. When insertion of a sound segment occurs middle of a word is
called epenthesis.
○ Epenthesis of vowel is called Anaptyxis and epenthesis of consonant
is called Excrescence.
○ Example of Anaptyxis in Punjabi
Morphology
Emergence of Morphology
● Fourth-century BC - Panini in Astadhyayi
● 1786 - Sir William Jones
● 1816 - Franz Bopp
● 1819 - 1837 - Jacob Grimm
● 1899 - Max Muller
● Lexeme:
○ A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics,
representing a set of words that are different forms of the same word.
○ It's like the idea or concept behind a word, irrespective of its specific
grammatical form or tense.
● Morpheme:
○ A morpheme is the smallest meaningful grammatical unit in a language.
○ E.G: Unhappiness : Un - happy - ness
○ that cannot be broken down further without losing or altering its meaning

● Now tell me what is the difference between lexeme and morpheme?

Morpheme, Morph, Allomorph
● Morpheme: The smallest difference in the shape of a word that
correlates with the smallest difference in word or sentence meaning or in
grammatical structure.
● Morph: A morph is a physical form representing some morpheme in a
language.
● Allomorph: If different morphs represent same morpheme, they are
grouped together and termed as allomorph of the same morpheme.
Phonological Conditioning
[p,b,m] /im/

[t,d,s & vowels] /in/

[k,g] /iŋ/
Grammatical Conditioning

The past tense

morpheme determines
the allomorphe
Lexical conditioning and Suppletion
● When certain words take particular allomorphe.
● That very lexical element determines which allomorphe to take.
● E.g: irregular plural marker in English
○ Ox - oxen (Not *oexes)
● The Suppletion is when allomorphs show no phonetic similarity with its
morpheme.
○ Good >Better
○ Go >went
Portmanteau morph, zero morph &empty morph
● A single morph stands for several different grammatical functions is
called portmanteau morph.
○ E.G.: The –s ending in English verbs (like walk-s, like-s) represents three
morpheme simultaneously. Such as – third person, singular and present tense.
● When no overt structural changes found to represent a morph is called zero morph.
○ put > put > put
● A morph represents nothing, but a part of word building process is called empty
morph.
○ sense - u - al
Types of Morpheme
● Root: the irreducible core of a word.
○ Free morpheme
■ Lexical: morphemes which carry the semantic content of a word. For example – noun,
adjective, verbs, adverbs.
■ Functional: morphemes which indicate the grammatical or logical relations in a sentence. For
example: articles, conjunctions, demonstratives
○ Bound morpheme
● Affix: Affix is morpheme that only occurs when attached to some other
morpheme or morphemes such as a root or stem or base.
○ Suffix
○ Prefix
○ Infix
● Stem: a word before inflection (only).
● Base: a word which can take both inflection and derivation.
● Example:
○ Work > works >
○ Work > worker > workers
● The word formation processes:
○ Inflection: does not change word class (both meaning and grammatical class).
○ Derivation: changes the word class.
○ Compounding: where more than one roots/free morpheme are combined to form a word.
■ Endocentric: Endocentric compounds have a head, which is a morpheme that determines the
grammatical category and the basic meaning of the compound.
● E.G.: blackboard; wristwatch; "fकताबघर"
■ Exocentric: Exocentric compounds do not have a head that determines the grammatical
category or the basic meaning. the meaning of the compound does not directly relate to the
meaning of its parts.
● E.g.: pickpocket
Syntax
Basic Concepts
● A sentence consists of a linear string of words.
● But what is the internal structure of a sentence?
● How the structure represented in our mind/brain?
● What intuitions we have about relationships between words in a
sentence?
● All these intuitions can be captured in two basic concepts:
○ Constituents and hierarchical structure
● Constituent: A group of words that functions together as a unit.
● Hierarchical Structure: Constituents in a sentence are embedded inside of
other constituents.
● In generative grammar, generalizations about structure are represented by
rules.
● These rules are said to “generate” the tree.
● The rules are called Phrase structure rules.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

Background
● Two levels of development:
● One level
○ Competence and Performance
○ Language acquisition
○ Innateness / Universal Grammar (UG)
● Another level
○ Description of syntax
○ Generative grammar and rewriting rules
Immediate Constituent (IC)Analysis
● To analyze each sentence and each constituent into their
independent sequences.
● The IC describes the constituents and their organization in a
sentence.
● IC helps us to understand how the units are structured by
layer.
● Originally proposed by Bloomfield.
The Criteria for IC cuts
● Internal cohesion: degree to which a sequence functions as a unit.
○ John worked > John | worked
○ The king of England opened the parliament > The king of England | opened the parliament
● Internal diversity: IC is substitutable by elements of maximally diverse internal
structure.
○ in the room > in | the room
● Independence: ICs should be as independent of each other in their distribution as
possible.
○ The room was dirty > The room | was dirty
○ I saw the room > I saw | the room
Demerits of IC analysis
● Discontinuous ICs: IC analysis is unable to analyze the discontinuous elements.
○ He see his friend off
● Constructional homonymy/ambiguities: By analyzing ICs we cannot resolve the
constructional ambiguities.
○ Some more | convincing evidence
○ Some more convincing | evidence
○ सीट पर बैठे हएु | कु त्ते को
◌ें बांध- ‘While seated tie the dog’
○ सीट पर बैठे हएु कु त्ते को ◌ें
| बांध - ‘Tie the dog that is seated’
● Overlapping ICs: Unable to analyze the ICs which overlaps in a sentence.
○ He has no knowledge, or interest in Linguistics.
Phrases and Structures
● Head: The word that gives its category to the phrase.
● Modifier: Modifiers are always attached within the phrase they modify.
● Principle of Modification: If an XP (that is, a phrase with some category X)
modifies some head Y, then XP must be a sister to Y (i.e., a daughter of YP)
● Noun Phrase (NP): where noun is the head.
● NP → (D) (AdjP+) N (PP+)
Noun Phrase (NP)

● where noun is the head. ● NP → (D)(AdjP+) N (PP+)

● Rules: ○ The (intelligent) beautiful
● NP → N girl of Sparta sleeps.
○ Sukanya sleeps
● NP → (D)N
○ The girl sleeps
● NP → (D) (AdjP+) N
○ The (intelligent) beautiful
girl sleeps
Adjective Phrases (AdjPs) and Adverb Phrases (AdvPs)
Where adjective is the head. Where adverb is the head

● Rules ● Rules
● AdjP → (AdvP) Adj ● AdvP → (AdvP) Adv
○ Very yellow ○ Very quickly
AdjP → (AdvP)Adj
● The big yellow box
● The very yellow box
Head modifier relationship
Prepositional Phrase (PP)
Where preposition is the head

● Rules
● PP → P (NP)
○ With an umbrella
○ I haven’t seen him before
Verb Phrase (VP)

● VP → V (intransitive) ● VP → (Advp+)V(AdvP+)
● He left ● He deliberately always left early
quitely

● He left quickly
● VP → V(AdvP)
● VP → (Advp+)V(NP)(AdvP+)
He [[killed]VP [his wife]NP] (quitely)
● VP → (Advp+)V(NP)(NP)(AdvP+)
He [gave]VP [the students]NP [a book]NP yesterday.
● VP → (Advp+)V(NP)(NP)(PP)(AdvP+) He
[put]VP [the book]NP [on the table]PP
Drawing syntactic tree
Buttom-up Top-down
Semantics
Introduction
● Semantics is the study of meaning communicated through language.
● A basic assumption: a person’s linguistic abilities are based on knowledge!
● The linguistic knowledge is about –
○ How to pronounce linguistic expressions
○ How to combine linguistic expressions
○ How to interpret and use individual words and sentences
● So, sense of knowing a word unites different kind of knowledge.
● Semantics is committed to describe the semantic knowledge.
● This semantic knowledge leads to infer different kinds of meaning
Semantic knowledge
● Synonymous: When sentence A and B describes the same situation/ knowledge.
○ In the spine, the thoracic vertebrae are above the lumbar vertebrae.
○ In the spine, the lumbar vertebrae are below the thoracic vertebrae.
● Contradict: When sentence A contradicts with sentence B, or vice-e-versa.
○ Addis Ababa is the capital of Ethiopia.
○ Addis Ababa is not the capital of Ethiopia.
● Ambiguous:
○ Flying planes can be dangerous.
● Entailment: A relationship between sentences that if a sentence A entails a
sentence B, then if we know A we automatically know B.
○ Henry murdered his bank manager.
○ Henry’s bank manager is dead.
Semantics and Semiotics
● Describing meaning communicated through the language is only part of a larger
enterprise of investigating how people understand meaning.
● Linguistic meaning is a special subset of the more general human ability to use
signs.
● For example:
○ His high temperature may mean he has a virus.
○ The red flag means it’s dangerous to swim.
● The study of linguistic meaning is a part of this general study of the use of sign
systems, and this general study is called semiotics.
● In terms of C.S ● In terms of Saussure
● Icon: An icon is where there is a similarity between a sign and what it
represents.
○ For example: between a portrait and its real life subject, or a diagram of an engine and the real
engine.
● Index: An index is where the sign is closely associated with its signified, often in a
causal relationship.
○ smoke is an index of fire.
● Symbol: A symbol is where there is only a conventional link between the sign and
its signified
○ Red signal in the traffic means stop.
Word Meaning and Sentence Meaning
● Knowing a language, especially one’s native language, involves knowing
thousands of words.
● The mental store of these words a lexicon.
● The mental lexicon is a large but finite body of knowledge, part of which must be
semantic.
● At any one time we hold a large amount of semantic knowledge in our memory
● Phrases and sentences also have meaning of course
● An important difference between word meaning and, phrase and sentence
meaning is productivity.
● It is always possible to create new words, but this is a relatively infrequent
occurrence.
● On the other hand, speakers regularly create sentences that they have never
used or heard before
● If a speaker can make up novel sentences and these sentences are understood,
then they obey the semantic rules of the language.
● So the meanings of sentences cannot be listed in a lexicon like the meanings of
words
● Semanticists often describe this by saying that sentence meaning is
compositional.
Sense and Reference
● The meaning of linguistic expressions derives from two sources:
○ the language they are part of
○ and the world they describe.
● Words stand in a relationship to the world, or our mental classification of it.
● They allow us to identify parts of the world, and make statements about them.
○ He saw Paul or She bought a dog
○ The underlined nouns allow to identify or refer to specific entities in the world.
● The relationship by which language hooks onto the world is usually called
reference.
● The semantic links between elements within the vocabulary system is an aspect of
their sense, or meaning.
Utterance, Sentence and Proposition
● Utterances are real pieces of speech.
○ John loves Mary. (if three persons in a room utter the same elements we will say
that there are three utterances, but one sentence).
● Sentences are abstract grammatical elements obtained from utterances.
○ John loves Mary.
○ Mary is loved by John.
● Propositions are descriptions of states of affairs.
○ This is John who loves Mary.
○ The one who loves Mary was John
○ This is Mary that John loves.
● The above sentences describe same state of affairs.
● So, the abstraction from the sentences we represent as:
● love(john, mary)
Literal and Non-Literal Meaning
● Literal: where the speaker speaks in a neutral, factually accurate way.
○ I am hungry
● Non-Literal: where the speaker deliberately describes something in untrue or
impossible terms in order to achieve special effects.
○ I am starving
○ I could eat a horse
● Non-literal uses of language are traditionally called figurative and are described by
a host of rhetorical terms including metaphor, irony etc.
Semantic Feature Theory
● Semantic feature is a theory of concepts associated with a lexical unit.
● Components of which a lexical unit is made of.
● Semantic features is one of a set of abstract elements, used systematically in
various combinations to define individuals meanings or a set of meanings.
Pragmatics
Introduction
● The term ‘pragmatics’ was first coined by Charles Morris (1938).
● Pragmatics = the relations of signs to interpreters.
● Pragmatics as the study of language use in context.
● The study of what speakers mean, or “speaker meaning” is called pragmatics.
● Pragmatics is the study of “invisible” meaning, or how we recognize what is
meant even when it isn’t actually said or written.
Pragmatic Studies
● Context:
○ Linguistic context: of a word is the set of other words used in the same phrase or sentence. The
surrounding context has a strong effect on what we think the word probably means.
■ I am going to spend my leisure in the bank.
■ I am going to withdraw some cash from bank.
○ Physical context: If we see the word BANK on the wall of a building in a city, the physical
location will influence our interpretation.
■ Physical context can be found in conversation also
● Deixis: Deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize
features of the context of utterance or speech event.
○ Person deixis: The first and second person personal pronouns, which realize person deixis,
through which speakers anchor what they say to the participants in the speech event.
○ E.g.: I told her that she will not come.
 ○ Place deixis: concerns the encoding of spatial locations relative to the location of the participants in
the speech event.
○ E.g: by describing any place like – kolkata, Ranchi, Chennai etc.
○ Or by describing symbolically, like – here, there etc.
○ Time deixis: concerns the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to the time at which an
utterance was spoken.
○ E.g: now, then, recently, soon, yesterday, tomorrow, is, was etc.
● Conversational Implicature: The notion of implicature provides some explicit
account of meaning more than what is ‘said’.
○
● Speech Act:
○ Speech as action
○ Language is not only to declare
○ But to perform some act
○ Language uses – performing some action
○ Speech act consists of
■ Locutionary act: actual utterance
■ Illocutionary act: specific meaning
■ Perlocutionary act: effect of utterance on istener
Language and
Brain
Introduction to
● What is going on inside our mind/brain when we are listening,
speaking, reading or writing?
● What stages do we go through when engaging in these language skills?
● How vocabulary stored in mind?
● How do we manage to find it when we need it?
● How do we comprehend language/speech?
● How do we understand, and construct meaning?
● How and when the language and brain are connected?
 Structure of the brain
1.The Brainstem is the lower and oldest part of the brain, comprising the midbrain,
pons and medulla. Often called the reptilian brain, it controls autonomic body
processes such as heartbeat, breathing, bladder function and sense of equilibrium.

2.The Limbic System is often referred to as the emotional brain. It

is buried deep within the brain and constitutes an evolutionarily
very old structure.
The limbic system includes the thalamus,
hypothalamus and amygdala
 3. The Cerebellum or “little brain”
has two hemispheres which have highly folded surfaces. The cerebellum is
responsible for regulation and control of fine movements, posture and balance.

4.The Cerebrum or cortex (grey matter) is largest decision-making part of the

human brain. It is generally associated with higher brain functions such as
conscious thought, action selection and control.

There are two cerebral hemispheres: left and right, joined by corpus callosum.
● Each hemisphere can further be divided into four lobes:
○ Frontal (8), Occipital (5), Temporal (6), Parietal (7)
 5. Occipital lobe
is the visual processing center of our brain, including low-level visuo-spatial
processing (orientation, spatial frequency), color differentiation and motion
perception.
6.Temporal lobe is associated with processing sensory input to derived, or higher,
meanings using visual memories, language and emotional association.
● Temporal cortex is responsible for long-term memory.
● Left temporal cortex is responsible for language comprehension, processing
and production (Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas).
Localization of Language in Brain
● Franz Joseph Gall first proposed (early nineteenth cent) the theory of
localization.
● The French surgeon Paul Broca (1860) proposed that language is localized to the
left hemisphere of the brain, and more specifically to the front part of the left
hemisphere (now called Broca’s area).
● Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist, described that language deficit occurred in
patients with lesions in areas of the left hemisphere temporal lobe, now known as
Wernicke’s area.
(First) Language acquisition
● How do infants come to acquire their first language?
● What stages do they go through in developing syntax, vocabulary and
phonology?
● What evidence is there that we possess an innate faculty for language which
enables us to acquire our first language.
● Remember your very early childhood, your first day at home. Do you remember?
● NO! But why?
● Because you were just crying! And the faculty of memory was not developed.
● So, let's study the crying first.
● The crying is a direct precursor to language and speech. Why?
● In the first few months, a child communicates different types of
discomforts through the cry.
● As time goes on, crying helps a child to learn how to produce linguistic
sounds.
● Over the time, crying transforms - from iconic to symbolic.
● In Iconic crying, there is a direct and transparent link between the
physical sound of crying and communicative intent.
● For symbolic crying, there is an indirect, subtle, and mostly random
association between their needs and crying.
Stages in Language Acquisition
● Pre-Linguistic stage
○ Crying
■ Iconic (first few weeks)
■ Symbolic (from first or second month)
○ Cooing (2 to 6 months)
■ making soft gurgling sounds
Linguistic Stage
● Babbling: the burst of consonant-vowel cluster string.
○ Marginal babbling – early stage, very few sounds, random.
○ Canonical babbling – later stage (around 8 months), syllables from the
caretaker's language.
● Holophrastic stage: the culmination of early language development -
the first word!
○ Idiomorphs: words that a child invents and have a special reference.
○ Egocentric Speech: speech related to daily objects.
Development of (PIVOT) Grammar
● Two-word stage
● Pivot - a set of words which are used to combine other words to make simple
phrase/sentence.
● Observations from the human and chimpanzee language data
○ Child shows a greater lexical diversity - 19 lexical items
○ Whereas chimpanzee produces only 7 items
○ Systematic combination of words with pivots for the child
○ Can you recognize which are pivots here?
○ Very random combinations found for the chimpanzee
○ Systematic combination entails fixed rules - phrase structure rules
● Syntax Development: It marks the beginning of syntactic understanding, where
words are combined according to some rudimentary rules to convey more complex
meanings.
● This development led to the birth of TG Grammar.
● Cognitive Development: The use of pivot words indicates a higher level of
cognitive functioning, where the child is not just labelling objects but is
beginning to express relationships between objects and actions.
● Communication: Pivot grammar allows children to communicate more complex
thoughts and needs, making it a critical step in language and communication skills
development - in contrast to the holophrastic stage.
● Innateness: Chimpanzee's learning language is evidence of human innateness.
● Universal Grammar: Chomsky argued that humans have the genetically
determined ability to stand upright, to walk and so to have the UG to acquire
language!
● Creativity:
○ It indicates a child's inborn sensitivity toward syntactic constructions.
○ This errors have some symmetric pattern - is called the creative construction.
Language Acquisition Theories
● Biological maturation theory
○ Biological maturation theory is a developmental theory that emphasizes the role of
biological factors in shaping human development.
○ Physical maturation is the primary driver of psychological development.
○ The timing and pace of biological changes in the body dictate the timing and pace of
cognitive, emotional, and social development.
○ Biological maturation theory proposes that through the maturation of the brain's
language centers, individual's ability to learn and use language can develop.
○ A child's brain develops and matures, the areas of the brain that are responsible for
language processing, such as Broca's and Wernicke's areas, become more specialized and
efficient.
○ This maturation process enables children to understand and produce more complex
language structures and to communicate with greater fluency and accuracy.
● Behavioral theories of language acquisition
○ B.F. Skinner
○ Language is learned through a process of stimulus-response
○ Children learn language by imitating the speech of those around them and
receiving positive reinforcement for their correct responses
○ Through this process, children gradually acquire the vocabulary, grammar, and
syntax of their native language.
● Linguistic Theory
○ Noam Chomsky
○ Innate cognitive mechanisms
○ Children are born with a set of universal grammar rules that allow them to
learn and produce language.
○ All human languages share a set of underlying grammatical principles that are
hard-wired into the human brain
○ Also emphasize the importance of input and interaction in the acquisition
process.
○ While children are born with innate linguistic knowledge, they also need
exposure to language in order to develop their language abilities.
● Information Processing Theory
○ Information processing theory is a cognitive approach to understanding how
individuals acquire and process information.
○ This theory suggests that language development is the result of the brain's
ability to encode, store, and retrieve linguistic information.
○ Language acquisition involves several cognitive processes, including attention,
perception, memory, and problem-solving.
○ As children learn more about their native language, they develop more
sophisticated memory systems that allow them to store and retrieve
increasingly complex linguistic information.
○ Information processing theory also suggests that problem-solving plays an
important role in language acquisition.
○ As children encounter new linguistic structures and vocabulary, they must use
their cognitive skills to analyze and understand the meaning of the information
presented to them.
● Social Interaction Theory
○ Lev Vygotsky
○ Social interaction of children lead to language learning process.
○ According to social interaction theory there are three processes to acquire
language -
○ Joint attention: the ability to share attention with another person towards the
same object or event.
○ Social Scaffolding: Caregivers may use simplified language or provide
additional information to help the child understand new words or concepts.
○ Zone of proximal development:
■ the range of tasks that a child can perform with the help of a more
knowledgeable individual.
■ Caregivers may provide support and guidance to help children learn
language and engage in conversations that are slightly beyond their
current language abilities.
Language (Communication) Disorders
● Aphasia: A disorder in the ability to produce or to understand spoken
language.
○ Broca’s aphasia (Agrammatism): an absence of syntactic structure and omission of
function words and inflections.
○ Wernicke’s aphasia (comprehension difficulties) is characterised by syntactically complex and
well structured speech, containing function words and correct affixation.
○ But there may be severe problems in retrieving vocabulary, with a reliance on general or
inappropriate nouns and verbs.
○ Jargon aphasia: characterised by a large number of nonsense words in the patient’s
speech.
○ conduction aphasia: characterised by an inability to repeat what has just been heard
(though comprehension may remain unaffected).
○ Anomia: where the main or only symptom is the inability to retrieve words.
● Autism
○ A condition characterised by a withdrawal from linguistic interaction with others.
○ The sufferer is often mute or uses language in a non-communicative way.
○ The symptoms of autism appear between the ages of one and three
○ They include delayed cognitive and linguistic development and a reduced ability to react to
people, events and objects.
● Dementia
○ Progressive cognitive dysfunction due to deterioration of brain tissue.
○ Subcortical dementia leads to a general slowing of activity, which may result in problems of
articulation.
○ The ability to retrieve words may be impaired.
○ In cortical dementia the conversation is marked by a lack of cohesion and multiple changes of
topic.
○ Lexical retrieval is severely affected.
Other language disorders (learning)
● Dyslexia – an impairment in systems used in reading
● Dysgraphia – an impairment in the systems used in writing
● Dyscalculia – an impairment in the systems used in communicating
numbers
Conclusion
● Most psycholinguistics research suggests that the first language acquisition
invariably occurs in sequential stages.
● But there are and always will be individual differences.
● Roger Brown discovered that there is a rate of language learning. They
experimented on three children.
● One of them was found linguistically one year ahead of learning, in spite of
belonging to the same environment.
● In spite of the exception, the most consistent finding of psycholinguistics
research is that children proceed systematically through the same learning
stages.
Reference & Text book
● Thomas Scovel, Psycholinguistics; chapter 2
Bi/Multilingualism
Bilingualism
● A bilingual individual is someone who speaks two languages.
● Bilingualism is the product of Second language acquisition.
● The form of bilingualism can be divided into two:
● Sequential: the acquisition of a second language by someone (adult or child)
who has already acquired a first language.
● Simultaneous bilingualism: simultaneous acquisition of two languages
beginning in infancy (or before the age of three years).
Theories of Bilingual Development
● The unitary system hypothesis
○ the child initially constructs only one lexicon and one grammar
○ E.g.: a Spanish-English bilingual child may use the Spanish word for milk, ‘leche’ and English word
‘water’ not ‘agua’ in Spanish.
● The separate systems hypothesis
○ the bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language
○ where the two languages diverge, children acquire the different rules of each language.
● Children showed simultaneous language mixing of two languages.
● The mixing in child language is similar to code switching used by many adult
bilinguals.
Multilingualism
● Multilingualism is condition where one can speaks more than two languages.
● Defining multilingualism is debatable –
○ Whether speaker would have a complete competence and control over other languages?
○ Knowing enough phrases and use of alternate language?
Issues of Second Language Acquisition
● SLA and Bilingualism – are they same/similar?
● Bilingualism is the end-product of SLA.
● SLA is the process of learning.
● Interlanguage: refers to the linguistic system that a learner constructs as they are
in the process of learning a second language.
○ It is a temporary linguistic system that emerges as learners attempt to communicate in the new
language
○ Interlanguage is characterized by a mixture of elements from the learner's first language and the
target language, as well as various errors and simplifications.
○ interlanguage is a natural and necessary part of the process of second language acquisition
● Linguistic Interference:
○ a phenomenon that occurs when knowledge of the first language (L1) affects the learning and use of a second
language (L2) or subsequent language.
○ Interference can manifest in various aspects of language use, including phonology (sounds), morphology (word
forms), syntax (sentence structure), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (language use in context).
○ Positive Interference: This happens when the structures or vocabulary of the first language and the second
language are similar, facilitating the learning of the second language.
■ For example, a Spanish speaker might find it easier to learn Italian because of similarities in vocabulary and
grammar between the two languages.
○ Negative Interference: Also known as transfer errors, this occurs when the differences between the first and
second languages lead to errors in the second language.
■ For example, a Bengali speaker often inappropriately use gender marker in course of using Hindi
language, as Hindi has rich gender marker while Bengali has not.
Differences between first and second language
acquisition
● Age and Critical Period:
○ First language acquisition typically occurs in early childhood, during a critical period when the brain
is particularly receptive to linguistic input. Children acquire their first language naturally and
unconsciously through exposure and interaction with their environment and caregivers.
○ Second language learning can happen at any age but is often more challenging after the critical
period (usually considered to end by puberty). While young children can acquire a second language
in a way that is very similar to their first, adults and older learners may require more explicit
instruction and conscious effort.
● Cognitive Processes:
○ First language acquisition is an innate process where children use their cognitive abilities to infer
linguistic rules from the spoken language around them without formal instruction.
○ Second language learning often involves more explicit teaching and learning strategies, such as
studying grammar rules, vocabulary, and practice through writing and speaking exercises. Adults
and older children are more likely to apply analytical skills and existing linguistic knowledge to learn
a new language.
● Proficiency and Accent:
○ Individuals typically achieve native-like fluency and pronunciation in their first language without
conscious effort.
○ Achieving native-like proficiency in a second language, especially regarding accent and idiomatic
expressions, can be more difficult and often depends on factors such as age of acquisition, the level
of immersion in the language environment, and individual aptitude.
Language Families in India
● Indo-Aryan Branch: This is the largest group of languages in India, spoken by about
three-quarters of the country's population. Major languages include:
○ Hindi: Spoken mainly in the northern part of the country.
○ Bengali: The second most spoken language in India, predominantly in West Bengal and Tripura.
○ Punjabi: Primarily spoken in Punjab.
○ Assamese: Spoken in Assam.
● Dravidian Family: Predominantly spoken in the southern part of India, this
family includes:
○ Tamil: Known for its rich literary tradition, spoken in Tamil Nadu and
parts of Sri Lanka.
○ Telugu: Spoken in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
○ Kannada: The official language of Karnataka.
○ Malayalam: Spoken in Kerala and parts of the Lakshadweep Islands.
● Austroasiatic Family: Spoken by tribal and indigenous communities in various
parts of India, particularly in the central and eastern regions. Major languages
include:
○ Santali: The most widely spoken Austroasiatic language in India, primarily in the states of
Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, and Bihar.
○ Ho, Khasi, and Mundari are other important Austroasiatic languages spoken in India.
● Sino-Tibetan Family: This family encompasses languages spoken in the
Himalayan region and the Northeast of India. Major languages include:
○ Meitei (Manipuri): Spoken in Manipur.
○ Bodo: Spoken in Assam.
○ Lepcha, Limbu, and languages of the Tibeto-Burman group, such as Mizo (Lushai), spoken in
Mizoram, and Nishi, spoken in Arunachal Pradesh.