Transcript New Employee Orientation

Linguistics week 11
Finish assimilation; start morphology
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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
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Economy of effort: allophonic
differences within one syllable
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The vowels in ㄢ and ㄤ 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!
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It is logical that tongue movement should be minimized
As long as people can understand what we are saying!
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Economy of effort: assimilation
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Another syllable or word influences
pronunciation, in rapid speech
How do you pronounce 根本?
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What about 多少錢
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This is an example of progressive assimilation
Cf Fromkin p305 on Akan language
This is an example of elision
Also 謝謝妳
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Are there any other three syllable expressions that work
like this
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Assimilation in English and
French
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Usually it’s regressive
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A phoneme is changed to accommodate
(match) the next phoneme.
Voicing
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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”
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Assimilation and elision are
important because
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We can understand better the idea of connected
speech
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The distinction between phonemes and allophones
becomes clearer
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Sounds are not pronounced in isolation, but depend on
their neighbors
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
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Morphology, then
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What is it?
It’s the study of word forms, and the changes we
make to words
It’s part of the grammar of languages?
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What is the other important part?
Some languages are morphologically more
complex than others
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What guess could you make about languages which are
not morphologically complex?
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Words. How many words are there in this
utterance?
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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
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How many different word-forms are there?
How many different lexemes are there?
And another question:
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What do you think “lexeme” means?
Lexemes and word-forms are very like phonemes and allophones,
actually.
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Word segmentation
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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
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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)
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With their pronunciation, meaning, and morphological structure
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Two kinds of words
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Function words
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Content words
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Restricted in number
A closed class
Have a grammatical function
Usually just one morpheme (a grammatical morpheme)
An open class
New content words often come into use in every
language
Which words on this slide …? Chinese examples?
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You think English is hard?
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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
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They were Latin inflections
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That means
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In English, inflection includes things like
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Number
Tense
BUT inflection does NOT allow for making a new lexeme
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The two lists each show the different word-forms, for a Latin noun
or verb
So sleepy is not an inflection of sleep
Write down 10 roots (like sleep)
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Give one or more inflected forms (eg sleeps) for each
And one or more derived forms (like sleepy)
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Inflectional morphology
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In English, inflection includes things like
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Number
Tense
BUT inflection does NOT allow for making a new
lexeme
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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)
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Inflectional vs derivational
morphology
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Inflection does not change the word class (syntactic
category, part-of-speech, 詞類)
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Derivation makes a new lexeme
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create  creates
Inflection is productive
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create  creative
Inflection just changes the grammatical ending of the
original lexeme
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Derivation may or may not change word class
You can add –s to any verb, to make it plural
Derivation is not necessarily productive
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You cannot always add un- to an adjective, or -ive to a verb
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Roots and affixes
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Unbelievable contains
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One free morpheme
A root and two affixes
» One prefix and one suffix
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In English, there are derivational prefixes and suffixes
There are no inflectional prefixes
Suffixes are more common in the world’s languages
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But Thai has only prefixes – no suffixes
Plural in the Zapotec language is realized by a prefix, not a suffix
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Infixes
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In Tagalog
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What is the root morpheme here?
What are the affixes?
Yule describes a kind of infix used in English
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sulat = write
sumulat = wrote
sinulat = was written
I don’t want to go to uni-bloody-versity
Is there any infixing in Mandarin, do you think?
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Reduplication
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Afrikaans
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Motu (Papua New Guinea)
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dik = ‘thick’; dikdik = ‘very thick’
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?
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Reading
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Read Chapter 7
Answer the Study Questions
Don’t look at page 255 until you have
finished!
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