Lecture 1 Systemic Functional Grammar by Michal Halliday (1960)

The Study of Language by George Yule 6th (ed) Summary

   Chapter.13:  First Language Acquisition

First language acquisition is without overt instruction for all children, regardless of great differences in their circumstances, provides strong support for the idea that there is an innate predisposition in the human infant to acquire language. It is a special capacity for language with which each newborn child is endowed. By itself, however, this inborn language capacity is not enough.

Acquisition

Some basic requirements of the process of language acquisition are;

1. Interaction with language users: During the first two or three years of development, a child requires interaction with other language-users in order to bring the general language capacity into contact with a particular language. For example, Genie a child does not hear or is not allowed to use language will learn no language.

2. Cultural transmission, meaning that the particular language a child learns is not genetically inherited, but is acquired in a particular language-using environment.

3. Physical Capacity: The child must also be physically capable of sending and receiving sound signals in a language. All infants make “cooing” and “babbling” noises during their first year, but congenitally (by birth)  deaf infants stop after about six months. So, in order to speak a language, a child must be able to hear that language being used. By itself, however, hearing language sounds is not enough.

Input

ü Under normal circumstances, human infants acquire language by the typical behavior of older children and adults in the home environment who provide language samples or input to the child.

ü Adults such as mom, dad and the grandparents tend not to address the little creature as if they are involved in normal adult-to-adult conversation like Oh, goody, Well, John Junior, 

Baby Talk

• A simplified speech style adopted by someone for interacting with a young child is baby talk.
• Other names of baby talk speech style are motherese or child-directed speech, or caregiver speech.

Characteristics of Baby Talk

• Simplified words (tummy, nana ) or alternative forms, with repeated simple sounds and syllables, for things in the child’s environment (choo-choo, poo-poo, pee-pee, wa-wa).
• Frequent use of questions, often using exaggerated intonation, extra loudness and a slower tempo with longer pauses.

Caregiver Speech

• In caregiver speech, a young child interacts with the speaking participants via his actions like smiles and sounds.

Characteristics of Caregiver Speech

• Caregiver speech is characterized by simple sentence structures and a lot of repetition and paraphrasing, with reference largely restricted to the here and now. 

The Acquisition Schedule

ü All normal children develop language roughly at the same time and schedule. They learn physical and motor skills like sitting up, crawling, standing, walking and using their hands for physical activities, as well as, language acquisition develops biologically in the infant’s brain.

•    It seems that the child has linguistic capacity biologically, which develops with the passage of time, during the early years of life when a child hears any sound and reacts by smiling or turning his head in the direction of the sounds.
•    At one month, an infant is capable of distinguishing between [ba] and [pa].
•     During the first three months, the child produces big smiles in response to a speaking face, and starts to create distinct vocalizations.

 Cooing/gooing

•    The earliest use of speech-like sounds is described as cooing.
•    During the first few months of life, the child gradually becomes capable of producing sequences of vowel-like sounds, particularly high vowels similar to [i] and [u].
•    By four months of age, the developing ability to bring the back of the tongue into regular contact with the back of the palate allows the infant to create sounds similar to the velar consonants [k] and [ɡ ], hence the common description as “cooing” or “gooing” for this type of production.
•     Speech perception studies have shown that by the time they are five months old, babies can already hear the difference between the vowels [i] and [a] and discriminate between syllables like [ba] and [ɡ a].

Babbling

•    Between six and eight months, the child is sitting up and producing a number of different vowels and consonants, as well as combinations such as ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga . This type of sound production is described as babbling.
•    In the later babbling stage, around nine to ten months, there are recognizable intonation patterns to the consonant and vowel combinations being produced, as well as variation in the combinations such as ba-ba-da-da .
•    Nasal sounds also become more common and certain syllable sequences such as ma-ma-ma and da-da-da are inevitably interpreted by parents as versions of “mama” and“dada” and repeated back to the child.
•     As children begin to pull themselves into a standing position during the tenth and eleventh months, they become capable of using their vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis. This late babbling stage is characterized by more complex syllable combinations (ma-da-ga-ba ), a lot of sound-play and attempted imitations.
•     This “pre-language” use of sound provides the child with some experience of the social role of speech because adults tend to react to the babbling, however incoherent, as if it is actually the child’s contribution to social interaction.

The One-Word Stage

•    Between twelve and eighteen months, children begin to produce a variety of recognizable single-unit utterances. This period is traditionally called the one word stage. 
•   Single-word stage is characterized by speech in which single terms are used for objects such as “milk,” “cookie,” “cat,” “cup” and “spoon” (usually pronounced [pun]). 

Holophrastic speech

•    The holophrastic speech means a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence to describe an utterance that could be a word, a phrase, or a sentence.
•    Many holophrastic utterances seem to be used to name objects, they may also be produced in circumstances that suggest the child is already extending their use.
•     For example, an empty bed may elicit the name of a sister who normally sleeps in the bed, even in the absence of the person named. During this stage, then, the child may be able to refer separately to Karen and bed, but isn’t ready yet to put the forms together in a more complex phrase. 

The Two-Word Stage

• In two-word stage, a child uses two distinct words together, when his vocabulary moves beyond fifty words at around 18 to 20 months.

•     By this time, the child is two years old, a variety of combinations similar to baby chair, mommy eat, cat bad will usually have appeared. The adult interpretation of such combinations is tied to the context of their utterance. The phrase baby chair may be taken as an expression of possession (= this is baby’s chair), or as a request (= put baby in chair), or as a statement (= baby is in the chair), depending on different circumstances.
•     Here are some other examples reported from the two-word stage:

        big boat doggie bark hit ball mama dress more milk shoe off
The child actually intends to communicate through such expressions, the significant functional consequences are that the adults or older children behave as if communication is taking place. That is, the child not only produces speech but also receives feedback confirming that the utterance worked as a contribution to the interaction.

•     Moreover, by the age of two, whether the child is producing 200 or 300 distinct “words,” he/she will be capable of understanding five times as many.

Telegraphic Speech

•    In telegraphic speech, between two and two and a half years old, the child begins producing a large number of utterances that could be classified as multiple-word speech and the variation in word forms begins to appear.

Characteristics

•   Strings of words (lexical morphemes) in phrases or sentences such as this shoe all wet, cat drink milk and daddy go bye-bye.
•   Sentence-building capacity developed and child can get the correct word order correct like inflections (-ing ) begin to appear in some word forms and simple prepositions (in, on ).
•   Vocabulary expansion: By the age of two and a half, the child’s vocabulary is expanding rapidly and the child is initiating more talk while increased physical activity includes running and jumping.
•    Clear Pronunciation: By three, the vocabulary has grown to hundreds of words and pronunciation has become clearer. 

An Introduction to Semantics in Linguistics

 

An Introduction to Semantics

Fundamental Concepts in Semantics

Definitions

"Semantics is the branch of linguistics that mainly concerns with how the ‘meanings’ are conveyed by the linguistics system consisting of different units, structures like morpheme, words, phrases and sentences. It is the knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of the language and in its patterns for building more elaborate meanings up to the level of sentence meanings."

“Semantics is the toolkit for the study of the meanings of words and sentences at the linguistics or non-linguistic levels.”

                                                         What is meaning?

Ogden and Richards (1923) define the term ‘meaning’ in their book “The Meaning of Meaning”.

“Meaning is an intrinsic property of something or words related to that words in the dictionary or connotations of a word.”

“Meaning is the thing to which the speaker of that word refers or should refer to which the speaker of that word believes himself to be referring or the hearer of that word believes is being referred.”

Words & Meaning

A.    Can I have your pen to write my phone number?

B.     I have a red pen.

Words	Meaning
Pen”  is a noun, Name of concept for pen is just pen. Words are names for their meanings, so we could say pen means pen.	Concepts of pen are meanings. Pen is an apparatus for writing. Part of knowledge or concept

Sense

Referent

Meaning of a word that lives permanently in the dictionary is sense. Meaning of the words “Pen” is  its sense. A word’s sense does not change every time the word takes on a new referent. Regardless of whether the referent of queen is Elizabeth II or Margrethe, its sense is something like ‘female reigning monarch’. However, that ‘female reigning monarch’ is not the only sense of the word queen. Another sense of queen is ‘second highest ranking piece in a game of chess’

Thing referred to is called the referent. Varies from occasion to occasion A referent is the particular thing, person, place, etc. An expression stands for on a particular occasion of use, It changes each time the word is applied to a different object or situation in the world.

Sense & Referent

Reference

There are two types of reference, speaker's reference and linguistic reference.

Speaker-reference is what the speaker is referring to by using some linguistic expression. E.g. here comes my love Elizabeth….( dear & close). It is pragmatic in nature.

Linguistic-reference is the systematic denotation of some linguistic expression as part of a language. e.g. here comes Queen Elizabeth refers in fact to the public figure Queen Elizabeth. It is semantic/dictionary meaning in nature.

                                  

Phonetics & Phonology Basic Definitions Lecture No : 02

Basic Definitions of Phonetics & Phonology

Phonetics & Phonology

Lecture No. 2

HEC based Syllabus

1. Vowels

2. Consonants

3.Diphthong

4. Monothong

5. Triphthong

Vowel

There are 44 phonemes, 20 vowels and 24 consonants in English language. Both vowels and consonants are sounds, not alphabets.

The speech sounds produce without any blockage/restriction /constriction of airflow from the vocal cords/organs are known as vowels sounds. For example, the sounds of English letters A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y is known as vowels sounds.

For the production of vowel sounds, human vocal cords like tongue, teeth, lips are left open and allow the air to pass through from the lungs to mouth freely with audible friction.

The speech sounds produce with the vibration of vocal cords and without audible friction from lungs to lips are termed as vowel sounds. For example,       

Long Vowel Sounds
/i:/ week /wi:k/	/ɑ:/ park /pa:k/
/ɔ:/  walk /wɔ:k/	/ɜ:/ word /wɜ:d/
/u:/ group /gru:p/,

ort Vowel Sounds
/ɪ/    fit /fiːt/,	/e/ pet /pet/,
/æ/ pat /pæt/,	/ʌ/ cut /kʌt/
/ʊ/   book /bʊk/,	/ɒ/ dog /dɒg/,
/ə/ about  /əˈbaʊt/

Consonants

Consonant sound is produced with the construction/restriction/stoppage of the flow of air in the vocal tract.

Consonant sounds  are articulated by temporary obstruction/stoppage of the airstream in the vocal cords are known as consonants.

There are 21 letters of English alphabets conveying 24 consonants sounds. For example, /p/,/b/,/t/, /d/,/k/,/g/

Consonants are classified based on three dimensions; 

1.     1. Place of articulation

2.     2. Manner of articulation

3.     3. Voicing

Monophthong / Pure Vowel

A vowel  remaining constant and does not change position or glide is called pure vowel. In Monothong, the quality of vowel remains unchanged, e.g. red /red/, car / kɑːr/ /kɑː/, sit/ sɪt/, /seat / siːt/.

Diphthong/Gliding Vowel

Sounds movement or glide of vowel from one to another is termed as diphthong. Gliding vowel is change in the sound quality of vowel. If two vowel produce single sound by moving from one vowel to another diphthong is produced, e.g. say /sei/, light /laɪt /, go/ ɡəʊ/.

There are 8 diphthong in English language.

 /aɪ/, Eye /aɪ/, Light /laɪt /, kite /kaɪt/,  

/əʊ/,   Boat /bəʊt/, Loan /ləʊn/, Though / /ðəʊ/

/eɪ/, Great/ɡreɪt/, Create /kriˈeɪt/, straight /streɪt/

/aʊ/, Town /taʊn/, Crown/ kraʊn/, Down /daʊn/, Vowel / vaʊəl/

/ɪə/, Ear /ɪə(r)/, Clear /klɪə(r)/, Fear /fɪə(r)

/eə/, Tear /teə(r)/, Pair /peə(r)/,Hair /heə(r)/

/ɔɪ/, Boy /bɔɪ/, Toy /tɔɪ/, Coy /kɔɪ/

/ʊə/, Sure /ʃʊə(r)/, Poor /pʊə(r)/

The first sound is constant/pure vowel in diphthong is the longer and stronger, in contrast, the second vowel is the shorter and quieter.

Triphthong

Triphthong is the glide/movement of a pure vowel to another vowel and then to the next one rapidly and uninterruptedly.

Triphthongs are formed by adding central glide and a combination of three consecutive pure vowel sounds.

There are 5 triphthongs in English language ending with /ə/

eɪ + ə  = eɪə    Player     /peɪə/

aɪ + ə  = aɪə   Fire         /faɪə/

ɔɪ + ə = ɔɪə     Royal     /rɔɪəl/  

əʊ+ ə = əuə     Mower   /məuə/         

aʊ + ə = auə   Hour      /hauə/, Vowel /vaʊəl/

Summary

• A vowel sound is produced without stoppage of the airstream in the vocal cords.
• A consonant sound is articulated with constriction of flow of the air for the short period of time and then release from the lungs to lips.
• Monothong is pure/single vowel sounds.
• Diphthong is the combination of two vowel sounds that glide from one to another, e.g, town /taʊn/.
• Triphthong is the combination of three pure vowel sounds, where a single sound moves towards the second vowel and then end at the third vowel sound, e.g, the word vowel /vaʊəl/

Questions

1.    1.  How many phonemes are in the English language?

2.     2. Define vowels & consonants.

3.     3. Differentiate between vowel and consonants.

4