A language is a System of Arbitrary Symbols…

A Language is a System of Arbitrary Symbols…

• A Language is a System of Arbitrary Symbols…

• Which of the following best captures the concept of ‘five’?

• Kannada aydu (South Asia)

• Basque bost (Western Europe)

• Arabic xamsa (Middle East)

• Coptic tiw (Egypt)

• Somali shanti (Northeastern Africa)

• Hausa biyar (Western Africa)

• Yoruba erin (Western Africa)

• Guarani po (South America)

• Finnish viisi (Northern Europe)

• Indonesian lima (Southeast Asia)

• Japanese itsutsu (Eastern Asia)

• Mohawk wisk (North America)

The -emes

• The -emes

• Phoneme: An abstract mental representation that …

• Organizes different sounds into a single mental unit To American English speakers, the usual pronunciations corresponding to the letter ‘t’ in write and writer seem the same, even though they are phonetically different.

• Distinguishes between meaning-bearing sound differences and those that are determined only by their sound environment:

• [i] and [I]: High front tense vs. High front lax
• Greek: Two sounds, one phoneme (Kal-El = Superman/Clark Kent)
• [i] appears in open syllables: [ti] ‘what’ [I] sppears in closed syllables: [tIs] ‘that one’
• English: Two sounds, two phonemes (Kal-El and some other alien)

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

• THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

• Overt case marking: A relationship between the shape of a phrase and its role in the action of a sentence

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

• THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

• English has a few pieces of overt case marking left, all in the pronouns: (* = ungrammatical, i.e. inconsistent with what native speakers of the language say and accept as well-formed)

• He loves her
• *He loves she
• *Him loves her
• Whom/Who did you see at the party last night?
• *Whom went to the party last night?

• English had a rich overt case marking system from its pre-historic beginnings to the 11th century CE.

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

• THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

• What happened between the 8th and 11th centuries?

• Phonological changes: Reduction of unstressed syllables, already underway since the early Germanic period

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

• THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

• What happened between the 8th and 11th centuries?

• Phonological changes: Reduction of unstressed syllables, already underway since the early Germanic period

• Loss of final consonants
• Loss of range of possible vowels

• Since overt case marking in Old English is realized in unstressed syllables, the system collapses, leaving us with the essentially fixed word order system we have today.

THIS IS THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

• THIS IS THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

• IN A FOUR-WEEK-LONG NUTSHELL

• Centuries-long games of musical chairs in the inventory of phonemes

• Another taste of the Great Vowel Shift (14th to 18th c.)

• Step-by-step regularization of morphology

• holpen  helped

• Erosion of overt morphology to mark case, number, gender, person

• Shift from relatively free to relatively fixed word order

WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?

• WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?

• Aside from broad, identifiable trends in language change like the one’s we’ve discussed the past few weeks, a lot of change appears to happen for no good reason.

• But there are still patterns, and we can drive ourselves crazy looking for reasons for them …

• … but we may not have to!

WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?

• WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?

• Quick answer: Variation, Interaction, and Time

• Variation is constant in language use in all communities and at all times.

• We vary constantly in our pronunciation of various phonemes and which affixes and words we use in particular contexts.

• We have a genetically endowed but mostly subconscious ability to monitor the statistical prevalence of one variant over another in a given setting.

• Children acquiring their native language(s) are especially sensitive to statistical patterns, and their speech tends to reflect and amplify statistical trends in the variation to which they are exposed.

WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?

• WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?

• We’re going to simulate this!

• You are a speaker of a pretend language, Eekspeak, and you notice that the people in your country have different words for a berry everyone likes to eat and make jewelry out of. 

• Some call the berry eek, and some call it ook. Still others say ahk or oke, and some really weird people, immigrants from a strange land, call it kwid. 

• You will be assigned one of these five variants at random.

• Get to know your neighbors, learn the names by which they call the berry, and adjust your word according to each of the following rules …

WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?

• WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?

• We’re going to simulate this!

• Run #1 & #2: If you have heard a word that is different from yours in 3 of your last 5 conversations, switch to that word!

• Royalty #1 & #2 If you talk to someone wearing a crown, change your word to what they say!

• Kwid Oppression: KWID speakers don’t change. Everyone else ignore KWID and play by Run #1

• Kwid Rule: If you talk to someone wearing a crown, change your word to what they say!