APPUNTI + RIASSUNTI LIBRI LINGUISTICS FOR COMMUNICATION - UNIPD - URRACI, Appunti di Linguistica Inglese

Scarica APPUNTI + RIASSUNTI LIBRI LINGUISTICS FOR COMMUNICATION - UNIPD - URRACI e più Appunti in PDF di Linguistica Inglese solo su Docsity! LINGUISTICS FOR COMMUNICATION – Urraci 17/03/2023 Basic concepts 1. What is linguistics? a. Grammar vs linguistics 2. What is a language? 3. The common foundation among languages a. Duality, displacement, productivity, recursion, reflexivity 4. Branches of linguistics Phonetics 5. Phones 6. Speech chain 7. Phones and orthography 8. The vocal tract a. Lungs b. Larynx c. Oral and nasal cavity 9. Articulators 10. Consonants a. Manners of articulation b. Places of articulation 11. Vowels a. Nasal and oral vowels b. Unrounded and rounded c. Describing vowels d. Prosodies e. Length 12. Syllables a. Stress b. Intonation c. Tone Phonology 13. Phonemes 14. Allophones 15. Minimal pair 16. Free variation and complementary distribution Morphology 17. Words a. Words and meaning b. Morphemes c. Morphemes and language acquisition d. Simple and complex words 18. Inflectional and derivational morphology a. Affixation b. Internal change c. Reduplication d. Suppletion 19. Derivation a. English affixes b. Italian affixes c. Prefixation and suffixation d. Complex words 20. Word formation a. Backformation b. Compounding c. Conversion d. Clipping e. Blending f. Acronyms 21. Allomorphs The lexicon 22. Words a. Lexemes and word forms 23. The lexicon a. The lexicon of a language b. Parts of speech 24. Loanwords a. Loan translation, calques b. English loanwords 25. Lexicon of a language – mental lexicon 26. How to classify lexicon (Italian language – tullio de mauro) 27. Word grouping a. Word families b. Domain specific vocabulary c. Layers of vocabulary d. The mental lexicon e. Vocabularies Semantics 28. Meaning a. Denotation vs connotation b. Polysemy c. Homonymy d. Literal and figurative meaning 29. Semantic relationship a. Synonymy b. Inclusion c. Antonymy Pragmatics 30. Beyond semantics a. Ellipsis b. Irony c. Ambiguity 31. Pragmatics a. Sentence vs utterance b. Context c. Deixis d. Pronouns e. Referring f. Implicatures g. Cooperative principle h. Relevance theory i. Speech acts The language of the news 32. Defining news 33. Structuring the story 34. The tools of the trade 35. Reporting information and evaluating likelyhood 36. The power of words BASIC CONCEPTS What is linguistics? Linguistics is the scientific study* of language: it analyses how language works, what rules govern language (grammar). It is interested in understanding what grammar is, how words and sentences convey meaning and how meaning is shaped and influenced by context. *What do we mean by scientific discipline? Because it employs an empirical and objective methodology to investigate how language function. It seeks to uncover pattern in the use of languages, develop hypotheses to explain patterns and test them using real-word data, lastly it doesn’t have any preconceived notions or biases. Therefore, linguistics adopts a critical and rigorous approach that is coherent with the scientific method. Linguistics analysis’ data are recordings, spoken or written language… Lastly, Linguistics has a scientific approach because it doesn’t merely collect observations. It formulates and tests hypotheses and generalizations, as well as theory development, development of ways of understanding language. Grammar VS Linguistics There is an important difference between traditional grammar and linguistics: linguistics aims to provide an accurate description of how languages are used in practice, rather than dictate how it should be used. Its primary aim is to provide and accurate description of languages, as they are spoken and written. Many people are concerned about grammar in general, but linguistics is not interested in normative aspects, it is concerned with what people actually say, not with what they should say: linguistics behaviour and practices. Distinction of 2 ways to look at languages: 1. Prescriptive approach: advocates for the proper way to speak or write, it’s the grammar taught in school. 2. Descriptive approach: does not aim to dictate the correct use of language but instead to observe, describe and explain linguistics behaviour. This approach is used by linguistics. Example: the use of lui and lei in Italian: “Lui prepara la cena” → this form is common in Italian, but not grammatically correct, it should have been “egli prepara la cena” since this one is the subjective pronoun. So, there is a clear difference between grammar (set of rules we have to respect) and linguistics (how people actually use the language). • Syntax: how words combine into phrases (= syntagma) and sentences (=frase) s, and how the words are related to one another. Syntax and morphology together make up the core of grammar. • Semantics: how meaning is encoded into words and sentences, it’s concerned with the aspects of meaning that are encoded by words and grammar. • Pragmatics: Pragmatics handles the aspects of meaning of an utterance that come from its use in a particular context. (ex. Come again. It has a clear semantic meaning, but the context changes it and gives more nuances: it could mean “repeat please” or “come again later”) • Sociolinguistics: investigates the complex relation between language and society. How social groups influence language variation (ex. Dialects). • Discourse analysis: examines stretches of a language both spoken and written, it attempts to find regularities such as how sentences are connected; how texts are made coherent. It can focus on conversation (conversation analysis), in this case it’s mostly interested in the interactional nature of language (different tones and gestures to express meaning and power dynamics) • Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics: the mental processes involved in language production and comprehension. Psycholinguistics investigates the mental processes underlying language processing, while neurolinguistics is biologically oriented, focusing on the brain’s language processing activities. • Language acquisition: is the field of linguistics that investigates processes of attaining comprehension and production of a language. It is concerned with how children acquire their first language (native language or mother tongue) and how adults learn second or later languages. • Historical linguistics: study of linguistic changes over time. • Applied linguistics: it has other subfield such as forensic linguistics and ? • Typology and universals are concerned with the range and limitations on structural variation among languages. Typology seeks to discover and account for the variation, while the study of language universals is concerned with identifying features common to all of the world’s languages. Questions from book: 8 Does written English show duality of patterning? What about written Mandarin Chinese? Explain. (See §13.2 for basic information on Chinese writing.) If your answer to both questions is ‘yes’, is the duality manifested in the same or different ways in the two types of writing? 9 We discussed six design features of human languages. Others have been proposed. Find out what they are, and think about their usefulness and the extent to which they distinguish human language from traffic lights or another system of signs used by humans or animals. (Begin with the website http://www.ling.ohio- state.edu/~swinters/371/designfeatures.html.) 10 We said that spoken and written language differ in certain respects. Is a good piece of writing also a good piece of speech if it is read aloud? What differences would you expect to find between speech and writing in the ways that things are expressed? What (if any) grammatical differences would you expect? 11 Writing does not only influence the way that people think about their language, but can also influence speech. What are some of the ways your language (and opinions about it) has been influenced by the way it is written? 12 We have mentioned a few branches of linguistics in this chapter. The list was selective, and there are many more named branches. Here are some: computational linguistics, contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, descriptive linguistics, dialectology, documentary linguistics, internet linguistics, lexicography, mathematical linguistics, narratology, onomastics, philology, philosophical linguistics, sign language linguistics and stylistics. Look up one or more of these terms in an encyclopaedia or dictionary of linguistics, and/or on the web, and write a paragraph description in your own words explaining what the branch studies. PHONETICS Phonetics delves into the study of speech sounds, more precisely their physical properties. It analyses how speech sounds are made. It can be categorised into 3 research areas: 1. Articulatory phonetics: is concerned with the physiological mechanisms involves in speech production, such as the movements of the tongue, lips and vocal cords. 2. Acoustic phonetics: measures and analyses the physical characteristics of sound waves, such as their frequency and amplitude. 3. Auditory phonetics: examines how speech sounds are perceived by the ears, converted into electrical signals and decoded by the brain. These areas come from the speech-chain model presented by Denes and Pinson in 1993, in which they identify the steps in conveying a message from speaker to hearer: - A thought emerges in the brain of the speaker and is encoded in language. - Messages are sent through nerves from the brain to the vocal apparatus – the various muscles and organs that act together to produce speech sounds. - The muscles and organs are positioned and set into motion. - As a result, sounds are produced that travel through the air. - These sounds reach the ears of the hearer, which ‘process’ the sounds, converting them into electrical signals. - These electrical signals travel along the auditory nerves to the brain of the hearer. - The hearer’s brain decodes these impulses, arriving at a thought (which is hopefully similar to the thought that started in the speaker’s brain). - The last three steps also apply to the speaker, in a feedback loop: the sound reaches the speaker’s ear and is converted to electrical signals that travel to the brain, which decodes them and compares the spoken utterance with the intended utterance. Phones the sound made in human languages, from the Greek φωνή (phōnḗ) meaning voice. Whistles are not phones since they are not part of any language. Speech chain It’s natural to think of speech as units, but there is no clear boundary between phones, speech is a continuous stream of sounds, we can’t clearly divide the speech chain into smaller units. It’s difficult to identify single sounds and the begging/end of words. Phonetics identifies phones by cutting out portions of the speech continuum corresponding to different states of the articulators. Phones and orthography For example: the word “aglio” how many phones (speech sounds) are there? Three: [a] [ʎ] [o] “vicious circle” the letter c is pronounced differently, there are three different sounds: [ʃ] [s] [k] “cane” e “quadro” in this case the letters c and q are pronounced in the same way, the phone is [k] There is no direct correspondence between phones and letters. The international phonetic alphabet (IPA) has been developed to overcome these kinds of ambiguities in 1888 by the International Phonetic Association with two main objectives: The vocal tract Sound is the result of vibrating air. Speaking involves shaping a stream of air inside the vocal tract by making it move and vibrate in different ways. The organs involved in producing the sounds of speech are referred to collectively as the vocal tract. These are the lungs, the larynx, the oral cavity (mouth) and the nasal cavity (nose). The lungs phones can be pronounced by pushing air out from the lungs: air is inhaled and then shaped as it is exhaled, these are called egressive phones. Speech in English and most other languages is usually produced on egressive pulmonic air. While the speech sounds that are articulated while inhaling are called ingressive phones. Therefore, lungs make ingressive and egressive movements that allow to produce phones. An example of ingressive phones are clicks, they are the rarest type of ingressive phones, they are produced by using the tongue to block the stram of air, and then quickly retracting it, causing air to be sucked in. They are common in south African languages. The larynx The larynx is small cartilage where the vocal cords reside. In the larynx the airstream passes between a pair of muscular flaps called the vocal folds or cords, which can be drawn together to interrupt the airstream, or left open. The vocal cords can be pulled apart, leaving open the glottis, or they can be drawn closer together, closing the glottis. When separated air passes through the glottis without much interference, producing voiceless sounds. When close together, the air passes between them and causes a vibration producing voiced sounds. For example cane, the sound [k] is a voiceless sound, while the sound [g] in the word gatto is voiced. The oral and nasal cavity After passing through the larynx, air can take two paths: it can pass only through the mouth, or it can exit both from mouth and nose. This depends on the positioning of the velum (the soft palate) situated at the back of the mouth. According on its position it can produce either nasal sounds when lowered, or oral sounds when raised (therefore the nasal cavity is blocked, and air exits only through the mouth). An example of nasal sound: [m] from the word mamma, example of oral sound [p] from the word pane. Articulators Simply exhaling air from the lungs does not result in speech sounds. Pronouncing a phone requires changing the shape of the oral cavity using both active and passive articulators. There are active and passive articulators: Active articulators (can move) - Lips - Tongue Passive articulators (cannot move) - Teeth - Alveolar ridge - Palate - Velum - Uvula - Pharynx 24/03/2023 Consonants Consonants involve a constriction in the vocal tract, obstructing the flow of air; the airstream is impeded or interrupted somewhere along the path from the lungs to the outside. It is obstructed either by momentarily blocking or restricting it. Consonants are described in terms of the point where the airstream is impeded, and how it is impeded. Nasal and oral vowels The velum may be lowered allowing air access to the nasal cavity, therefore producing nasal sounds. Air exits through both the nose and the mouth. On the other hand, when the velum is raised, we produce oral vowels because air exits only through the mouth. Examples from French: lot [‘lɔ] is oral, long is nasal; laid is oral, lin is nasal; la is oral, lent is nasal. The position of the tongue and of the lips changes the pronunciation of vowels. The trapezoid represents the shape of the oral cavity, the right side represents the back of the mouth while the front represents the front. The position of each vowel symbol represents the position of the tongue during the pronunciation. For example, i is on the up left therefore the tongue will be at the front. We can identify some coordinates used to describe the vowels by linguists: 1. Vertical axis: we can distinguish high, mid and low vowels → position of the tongue. Mid vowels: the tongue is in a natural position. 2. Horizontal axis: divided into front, central and back. → The advancement of the tongue. We can describe vowels is a more nuanced way: looking at the horizontal axis we can further add: near front and near back, that suggest middle positions. Looking at the vertical axis it is a bit more complex: other than the distinction of high, mid and low there is the distinction between close and open that depends on the height of the tongue that opens or closes further the vocal tract. For close vowels the tongue is higher, there’s less space between the tongue and the palate, therefore the vocal tract is more constricted. Open vowels are pronounced with the tongue in a lower position, there’s more space between the tongue and the palate, so the vocal tract is more open. There is a further distinction of the openness of the vocal tract with the introduction of near-close, close-mid and near-open. Unrounded and rounded The position of the lips distinguishes two types of vowels: rounded and unrounded because changes the position of the resonating chamber. • Rounded: vowels are pronounced by pushing the lips forwards, creating a rounded shape. Tutto [u], onda [o]. • Unrounded: vowels are pronounced with the lips in a neutral position. Isola [i], free [i], stella [e]. Describing vowels We can accurately characterise vowels by considering the tongue height, the tongue advancement and position of the lips. Examples: [i] close front unrounded [ɛ] open-mid front unrounded [e] close-mid front unrounded [a] open front unrounded [u] close back rounded [ɔ] open-mid back rounded [o] close-mid back rounded [ɒ] open back rounded Italian vowels Consists of 7 vowels: [a] low central unrounded palo [ɛ] low-mid front unrounded cioè → aperta [e] high-mid front unrounded perché → chiusa [i] high front unrounded città [ɔ] low-mid back rounded topo → aperta [o] high-mid back rounded come → chiusa [u] high back rounded fungo [a] is a low central vowel, however there is no IPA letter to represent the open front vowel, therefore the same symbol is used. The high-mid and low-mid vowels are commonly respectively called chiuse [e] [o] and aperte [ɔ][ɛ]. Variations in the vocal system across Italy pose difficulties distinguishing high-mid and low-mid, Sardinians have only 5 vowels as they have the tendency to pronounce vowels as open-mid. The distinction between open-mid and close-mid vowel is not inherited from Latin. In Latin, vowel sounds were only distinguished by length (short and long) and is no more considered as a feature of vowels. [e] věnit vs [e:] vënit. Prosodies Vowels and consonants are segments that come one after another in speech (although the boundaries between them are generally not precisely delimited, as we have seen). Some phonetic properties are spread over sequences of phones. These are called prosodies or suprasegmentals. Two prosodies are discussed in this section, pitch and stress. Others include loudness, tempo, length and rhythm. Length Length is the amount of time for which a phone is sustained, its duration. It’s affected by: • The phonetic context, • the word in which it appears, • the speaker’s rate of speech, • the speaker’s habitual patterns. Moreover, our brain typically perceives the duration of a phone not in absolute terms, but rather in relation to: • Typical length of that phone • Length of the other phones within the same word. As a consequence, two phones of the same duration may be perceived as long in one context and short in another one. Due to these factors, in our analysis we are not going to consider the exact duration of phones; instead, we will refer to the length of speech sounds in relative terms, categorizing them as short or long. They are not well-defined stretches of time, but relative to the duration of a phone compared to that of surrounding speech sounds. Consonant length: We call geminate a consonant sustained for a longer time than usual. In Italian, the use of geminates may produce different words: caro → carro, nono → nonno, pala → palla. The only difference is the relative duration of the consonant. In English, there is no distinction between long and short consonants within words, the spelling is misleading, so double consonants are not geminates: supper → super. Syllable Phones combine into larger units called syllables. It’s a linguistic unit that is easily perceived but challenging to define. Speakers can usually agree on how many syllables are in a word: ca/sa, pub/lish, le/zio/ne, con/sis/tent. However, it’s difficult to identify the factors governing the perception of speakers. Syllables generally consist of a vowel surrounded by one or more consonants, usually before the vowel, sometimes after it. A syllable is defined as an intermediate unit of sound between phones and words, defined by the presence of a single peak of sonority. The peak of sonority is the nucleus of the syllable, it’s the most prominent part and the loudest. It’s produced with the least obstruction of the vocal tract and the strongest acoustic energy. Sonority can be defined as relative openness of the vocal tract, which corresponds directly to the relative loudness of a sound. The most sonorous sounds are the low vowels; the mouth is wide open, and the sound flows freely out. The least sonorous sounds are the voiceless stops; the mouth is completely shut, and no sound is made at all. The speech stream is organized into peaks and valleys of sonority. A syllable, then, may be defined as a way of organizing sounds around a peak of sonority. A syllable is a sequence of phones that are drawn towards peak of sonority. The most sonorous element of a syllable, the peak itself, is called the nucleus. Lower sonority sounds preceding the nucleus are called the onset; those following the nucleus are called the coda. The nucleus and coda together form the rhyme. Stress The relative prominence of a syllable over the others in the same word. It’s given by the combination of: - Longer duration - Greater loudness - Higher pitch (Pitch refers to the frequency of vibration of the vocal folds. Variations in pitch are used in two main ways in languages: to distinguish between words (tone); and to convey different inflections on the meaning of an utterance (intonation)). For example, the stressed syllable in the word lezione [let.’ʦjo:.ne] is the one in the middle. Syllables with greater energy are stressed syllables, indicated in the IPA by a ‘ before the syllable. The stress can be fixed: when it falls on the same syllable. For example, for the language Farsi the first syllable is always stressed; in French the last syllable is always stressed. It’s called lexical stress when the stress placement is variable and unpredictable. In Italian the stress can fall onto the last syllable caffè, on the second to last lezione, third to last tavolo, fourth to last partecipano. Altering the position may affect the meaning: papà → papa, prìncipi → princìpi, lèggere → leggère. The subject → to subject, the insult → to insult, the project → to project. Intonation Intonation refers to the changes in fundamental frequency that occur while speaking. It’s the manipulation of pitch to convey meanings that go beyond the words used. The pitch is the highness or lowness of a sound, it is determined by the frequency of the sound wave. Intonation patterns are called contours. All languages use variation in pitch over an utterance to convey modulations of the meaning expressed by the words. Tone Many languages use different patterns of pitch to distinguish words. Tonal languages are characterized by the presence of tone, which refers to changes in pitch that occur at the level of individual words and can differentiate between meanings. Example: for the language Dida (Ivory Coast) [sù] is hot, [sū] is tree. Ven 1/04/2023 PHONOLOGY Phonology investigates the sound differences that are linguistically relevant in a language, and how the sounds pattern as a system. Phonology investigates the organization of speech sounds in a language. Phonetics is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds, phonology is focused on their cognitive and functional aspects, considered in relation to a specific linguistic system. How many distinct phones does a language have? How many different speech sounds are there in English? The answer is not straightforward. The pronunciation of a phone varies across different speaker and even within the same speaker: there are slight acoustic differences. Some of these differenced are so subtle that they are undetectable, while others can be perceived but are simply ignored. Every phone is pronounced in an infinite number of different ways, every language has potentially unlimited number of phones. How can we communicate and understand each other if phones are so variable? How can we recognize the words pronounced by others if the actual sounds that comprise them keep varying? Phonemes Phonemes are mental constructs, they allow us to perceive multiple phones as a single linguistic unit, regardless of their different acoustic properties. They have a contrastive nature, they can distinguish between words and between different meanings.. A phoneme is an abstraction that represents a set of speech sounds that are functionally identical in a certain language. (Allophones, different realizations of the same phoneme) All human languages distinguish a limited number of phonemes. - first step: look for minimal pairs (the only minimal pair is cure and nurse but it is not relevant) - there are no minimal pair, therefore the vowels are allophones and not phonemes. - Examine the environments in which the vowels are found: identify the context preceding an following each vowel. We can then look for similarities between them. o Vowels are preceded by similar phones, so there is no complementary distribution considering the preceding consonant. o It we consider the following phones we can see that they are mutually exclusive, there is no overlapping. Based on this data, we can say that the open vowel [ɔ] is found before [m, n ŋ, ɲ] while [o] before [t, g, k, #, ʤ]. - Commonalities as places of articulation for the following phones? [m, n ŋ, ɲ] are nasal sounds, [t, g, k, #, ʤ] are stops but g is an affricate (t, k voiceless, g and ʤ are voiced) so there are commonalities only in the first list. They are the reason why there is complementary distribution. - We can conclude that in Swahili the two vowels considered are allophones, there is no overlapping in the two contexts, and we can say that the open vowel [ɔ] is always found before nasal consonants, while the closed one [o] is found before non-nasal consonants and the end of the word. Phonemic analysis flowchart to recognize phonemes and allophones 1. The first step is to identify the target sounds: their position in the word. 2. Look for minimal pairs: words that differ from one sound and have different meanings. a. If there is they are distinct phonemes b. If there isn’t we check for free variation between allophones i. If they have the same position and the word have the same meaning, there is free variation. ii. If not, we check if there is complementary distribution: if there are common characteristics of phones before or after the considered phone. (we can find a rule to explain the distribution of the sound, they have to share a common property and not a common difference (such as “non-nasals”). 1. If yes, there is complementary distribution. 2. If not, there not enough data. Exercise: identify the two allophones in complementary distribution of the labiodental nasal [ɱ] and the velar nasal [ŋ] - Considering that they are allophones and there is complementary distribution, we check for rules looking at the positions of the phonemes. - The words: inventario [iɱventarjo], fungo, angolo, bianco, anfibio [aɱfibio], sconvolto [skoɱvɔlto], anfora [aɱfora], anche. ɱ before: i, a, o after: v, f (labiodental fricative) ŋ before: u, a after: g, k (velar plosive) It’s more relevant the place or the manner of articulation? the place of articulation since the difference between the two target sounds is the place of articulation. As a rule, we can therefore say that the nasal consonants assimilate the place of articulation of the consonants that come after them. In Italian we also have [n] (alveolar, nasal consonant) and we find it in fact before consonants with an alveolar place of articulation [t, d] or also vowels. Exercise: [q] uvular stop and [k] velar stop - Minimal pairs: no minimal pairs related to those two sounds. But to the single sounds, like: welcome [qoʃ], hand [qol], kick [qet] and sand [qem], hill [qɑr] and snow [qur] and go away [qer]. - There is no free variation. [q] after [o, Θ, ɑ, ɯ] [ɑ] is back low, [ɯ] is back high, [o] is back high mid, [Θ] is close to the back [k] after [y, ø, i, æ] [y] and [i] are front high, [ø] is front high mid Both sounds are at the begging of the word and are followed by vowels, but those vowels are different. After [q] there are back vowels, while after [k] are front vowels. Why? Because of the place of the tongue (places of articulation), (front vowel the tongue is on the front and the contrary for the back), for the velar the tongue is near the velum, and uvular the sound is near the uvular. So there is a tendency to pronounce a velar consonant before a front vowel because it is easier considering the tongue position. There is a tendency to simplify the articulation. Test Phonology 1 IPA English Gloss 1. nani? "fish" 2. minti 'arrve' 3. akanka? ‘chicken' 4.-ifkin eye 5. naknî? man, male' List the environment. sea IPA antalò:lo inkori minko? sinti? tinko English Gloss ‘my peach' ‘his/ner skunk' ‘chief “Snake' be fat Consider Ue highilighited termi. In the fields below, enter Ue suunds Uial occur before and aller [n]. Use the pound sign (#) to indicate a word boundary. Use _to indicate the placement of the terget sound. E.g. : ad Risposta: i # La risposta corretta IPA English Gloss 1. nani? fish 2. tinti arrve' 3. akamka? ‘chicken' 4. ikn eye 5. nakni? ‘man, male' List the environment. A antalé:lo inkori minko? sinti? tinko English Gloss ‘my peach' ‘his/ner skunk' ‘chief “snake be fat Consider the highlighted term. In the fields below, enter the sounds that occur before and after [n]. Use the pound sign (#) to indicate a word boundary. Use _to Indicate the placement of the terget sound. E.g. : at Risposta: #a La risposta corretta è :# a IPA English Gloss IPA English Gloss 1. nani? ‘fish 6. antakò:lo ‘my peach' 2. minti ‘arrive! 7. inkoni ‘his/her skunk' 3. akanka? ‘chicken 8. minko? ‘chief 4. ifkin ‘eye 9. sinti? ‘snake 5. nakni? ‘man, male' 10. sinko "be fat' List the environments. Consider the highlighted term. In the fields below, enter the sounds that occur before and after [n]. Use the pound sign (#) to indicate a word boundary. Use _to indicate the placement of the target sound. E.g. : a# Risposta: at v La risposta corretta è at IPA English Gloss IPA English Gloss 1. nani? ‘fish 6. antakò:lo ‘my peach' 2. minti ‘arrive! 7. inkoni ‘his/her skunk' 3. akanka? ‘chicken' 8. minko? ‘chief 4. ifkin eye! 9. sinti? ‘snake 5. nakni? ‘man, male" 10. tinko “be fat" List the environments. Consider the highlighted term. In the fields below, enter the sounds that occur before and after [n]. Use the pound sign (#) to indicate a word boundary. Use _to indicate the placement of the target sound. E.g. : a# Risposta: ik Da La risposta corretta è  IPA English Gloss English Gloss 1. nani? ‘fish' 6 ‘my peach' 2. minti 'arrive' 7. ‘his/her skunk' 3. akamka? "chicken 8 ‘chief 4. ikin ‘eye' 9 ‘snake 5. nakni? "man. male' 10. ‘be fat List the environments. Consider the highlighted term. In the fields below, enter the sounds that occur before and after [n]. Use the pound sign (#) to indicate a word boundary. Use _to indicate the placement of the target sound. Eg. : at Risposta: | 0 v The table below includes all the environments you listed. Do the sounds preceding [n] overlap with those preceding [n]? ®© a. Yesy © b. No Are [n] and [n] in complementary distribution? © a Vesy O b. No How can we describe the complementary distribution between [n] and [n]? ‘® a._ [n] occurs before voiceless velar stops, [n] in all the other environmentsw? © b. [n] occurs after voiceless velar stops, [n]in all the other environments © © [n] occurs before voiceless velar stops, [n] in all the other environments. © d. [n] occurs after voiceless velar stops, [n] in all the other environments Test Phonology 2 of me following pairs of words represents a minimal pair for [K] and [g] in (® a. stack [stack] and stag [stag] Y © b. cab[kzeb] and grab [gib] © e kit [kzt] and guitar [gita] © d. kit [kst] and get [get] Which of the following pairs of words represents a minimal pair for [s] and [JJ in English? © a. shook [uk] and shock Jak] ® bi. crash [kuzef] and crass [kuces]Y © c. sheep [fin] and sip [stp] © di usher [Nea] and crust [Kunst] If we can write a rule to correctly predict which of two sounds will occur in what environment in a language, that means those two sounds are în which type of distribution? © a. free variation © b. contrastive distribution © c. complementary distributionw Which of the below represents the environment for [z] in buzz [baz]? Va. #b O b. ba O e AZ ®© d. A#M If a minimal pair is found for two sounds in a language, that means the two sounds are: © a. allophones of the same phoneme in free variation © b. allophones of two separate phonemesw © «. allophones of the same phoneme in complementary distribution © d. phones with unknown phonemic status Minimal pair refers to © a. a paîr of words with different meanings that differ in only one sound © b. twovariant pronunciations of a single word which differ in one only sound; there is no difference in meaning © &. a paîr of words with different meanings that differ in more than one sound, but în which the sounds immediately adjacent to the target sounds are the same în both words © d. a pair of words that differ for at least two sounds INTRODUCTION TO DISTRIBUTIONAL SEMANTICS MEANINGFUL WORDS – MACIEJ EDER 18/04/2023 Differentiation of texts: - Authorship attribution (stylometric approach) - Information retrieval: what a text is about. Information retrieval The distribution of semantics: it starts with a definition of the word, the meaning is defined by the context, according to the use of the word. Distributional semantics: a set of methods that make no assumption as to words relations and/or functions. - Meaning of the words is inferred from their: frequency and context - The methods: keyword analysis, collocations, topic modelling, word embedding. Keyword Analysis - A way to compare corpora - Information retrieval: meaningful words and what a text is about - You look for significant differences between texts or corpora. For example, given a sentence, keyword analysis orders the word in order of keyness: the most important ones should be nouns, verbs… and the least important are articles and prepositions (function words). Looking at the frequencies, we notice that in word distribution: there are few very frequent words, and there are a lot of less frequent words. Amongst the most frequent are the functional words. So for keyword analysis the frequency is not the most important parameter: - Method keyword LL - Method Zeta: keyword analysis extraction method. You compare 2 texts or corpora, chances are the words are distributed similarly, it divides the texts into chunks and calculates the frequency of each word. - Tf-idf method: term frequency x inversed document frequency, similar to the zeta, it favours words that are not spread across all the corpora or texts. - A new method: we don’t exactly need one, but they discovered it. Given two corpora, we check the frequencies and instead of comparing frequency, they compare the cumulative frequency. It’s simpler than the other methods, equal in results, but it shows an interesting feature of the language: from the cumulative sum you can extract keywords. Collocations A collocation is a pair of words that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. Typical collocations are idioms or phrasal verbs. We can think of collocations’ frequency as probability, it is very low for collocations because you multiply the probabilities of finding both words. Topic modelling To know what many texts are about, we look for keywords in collocations. It helps discover thematic structures of a text. Collocation, co-occurrences and context are important to extract meaning for a machine. The assumption is that a text has more than one topic, and a topic is a recurring pattern of co-occurring words that are semantically similar. The topics’ proportions are not equal. - Method: Latent Dirichlet Allocation 21/04/23 27/04/23 28/04/23 MORPHOLOGY Morphology studies the internal structure of words, and the processes of word formation. It describes the meaningful parts of which words are comprised. Words Words are easy to identify, because there are boundaries between words, because of recurring patterns and lexical categories (parts of speech), but they are difficult to define. What is a word? linguists struggle to frame a definition which is appropriate for all languages. A few hypothesis are: - Words are linguistic units separated by spaces when written (but it is not applicable to unwritten languages, furthermore some writings are continuous. - Words are linguistics units separated by pauses in spoken language (but a speech is continuous). - Words are identifiable base on the position of the stress (not applicable to languages with lexical stress). Words have three main properties: • Non interruptible: They cannot be interrupted by the insertion of new material. A word can usually be separated from its neighbours by inserting an additional word (the dog → the brown dog), however, words cannot be interrupted by the insertion of new material (the dbrownog). • Independence: They can stand alone as an utterance. Given the appropriate context, words can be pronounced in isolation and form sentences by themselves. (what color is your dog? Brown.) • Non fixed position: The order of the phonemes that comprise them can’t be changed. Wprds can appear in different contexts, and their order may be rearranged (il gatto corre veloce = veloce corre il gatto), however, smaller linguistics elements must remain in their fixed positions (il gat corre to). These parameters are not absolute and universal, but rather general tendencies that apply to most languages. Words are the smallest free forms found in language: they have a certain degree of independence from other words in the sentence, in the sense that they can be separated from them (this gives us the ‘free’ bit), and no smaller part of them has such freedom (giving the ‘minimal’ bit). For this reason, while talking you could pause after each word but you can’t pause within the words. Each word can stand alone as an utterance but not single letters. They: - Can be separated from neighbouring elements, - Are not bound to specific contexts, - Can appear in isolation. Words and meaning Words are commonly associated to a specific concept, action, or feeling, or they are thought of as having a single referent. Meaning appears to be a fundamental property of words. However, the relation between meaning and words is more complicated than it seems. If we consider the words dinosaur and dinosaurs, we know that even if they have the same meaning, the final -s contributes to partially changing it, it introduces the concept of plural. That means that meaning is not a unique characteristic of words, their subparts may convey a meaning too. Examples: kills (kill+s), builder (build+er), printers (print+er+s) Morphemes Simple words like farm, kill and duck that have no internal structure, and complex words like farmer, kills and duckling that do have internal structure. Complex words can be divided into smaller components that convey a distinct meaning: words are comprised of meaningful subparts called morphemes → they are the smallest units of language that carry meaning. • Morphemes convey meaning: walk is a single morpheme with one meaning, walked has two morphemes. Wal is not a morpheme and does not carry meaning. • Morphemes cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts: read is a morpheme, r and ead are not. Dogs is not a morpheme, it is composed of two morphemes. To recap, morphemes must have a meaning, and they cannot be broken down into smaller parts that convey meaning. Also, be aware of the fact that word and morpheme are two distinct concepts: for example, cat is a word, and so I cats; and yet cat is one morpheme, while cats consist of two morphemes. Also, -s is a morpheme, but it is not a word. Types of morphemes According to function or use: 1. Lexical morphemes convey the major ‘content’ of a message, specifying the things, qualities and events spoken about., they refer to thing, ideas, and actions. Lexical morphemes can also be bound: a. bound lexical roots (e.g., Nyulnyul has around 50 bound roots, mainly terms for parts of the body, that must take a prefix indicating the owner of the part) b. derivational affixes: affixes that attach to a lexical root and result in a new word, a complex item called a stem. (e.g., farm → farmer) 2. Grammatical morphemes indicate the relationship between words, specify the lexical categories, and provide information such as number and gender. They give information about the grammatical structure of the utterance. they can be either free or bound. a. Free grammatical morphemes: and, but, by, in, on, not, the, a, that, it, me and so forth. b. Bound grammatical morphemes are inflectional affixes and clitics. Inflectional affixes are bound morphemes that give grammatical information relevant to the interpretation of a sentence. They do not give rise to new lexical words, but to different forms of a single lexical word. (plural, cases, verb inflections…). Bound grammatical morphemes like -n’t in haven’t, which behave grammatically as separate words, but are phonologically part of the preceding word, are called enclitics. If they are part of a following word, they are called proclitics; the term clitic is a generic term covering both types. (e.g. the English possessive ‘s). - Lens simple, L,F - Countess complex: count (L,F) – ess (G,B) - Rabbit simple, L,F - Wiped complex: wipe (L,F) – ed (G,B) - Spain simple, L,F Inflectional and derivational morphology Inflection: modification of a word’s form to indicate grammatical information. Conveys grammaticalized aspects of meaning. E.g. tense, mood and person of a verb; number*, gender and case**. *English and Italian codify the category of numbers as singular vs plural, other languages (like Gaelik and Slovene) include an additional category: dual, which refers to two entities. **The case is the syntactic role of a word in the context of a specific sentence (subject, direct object…). Servī dominōs audiunt (the slaves hear the masters) → slave-PL: SUB, master-PL: OBJ, hear-they: PRS. Dominī servōs audiunt (the masters hear the slaves) → master-PL: SUB, slave-PL: OBJ, hear-they: PRS. Case is present in numerous languages. E.g. German, Farsi, Finnish, Russian, Tamil. Inflection varies among different languages: each language selects a different set of grammatical meaning to convey. 1. Affixation Inflection of a word through the addition of an affix: a grammatical bound morpheme. English has a limited number of inflectional affixes, all suffixes: - Pural marker -s - Possessive ‘s - 3rd person present singular -s - Progressive -ing - Past tense -ed - Past participle -en - Comparative -er - Superlative -est Affixation is the main inflectional process in Italian: e.g. gatto VS gatte. 2. Internal change A non-morphemic segment is substituted for another to indicate a grammatical contrast. The most common type is called ablaut, which refers to a vowel alternation within the root. - Sing sang - Sink sank - Drive drove - Rise rose There is no affix (e.g. -ed): the tense of the verb is modified by swapping one vowel for another. It can affect also nouns: foot → feet, where the plural is not created by adding the plural -s, but by changing the root’s vowel. 3. Reduplication Reduplication marks a grammatical or semantic contrast by repeating all or part of the lexical morpheme. E.g., Tagalog creates the future tense with the reduplication of the first syllable: pasok ‘enter’→ pa-pasok ‘will enter’; alis ‘leave’ → a-alis ‘will leave’; dalo ‘attend’ → da-dalo ‘will attend’. E.g., Indonesian forms plurals with the full reduplication of the noun: anak ‘child’ → anak-anak ‘children’. Reduplication is often considered marginal in English, although this is questionable: over 2,000 words are formed by this process according to Burridge. Sometimes the whole stem is repeated, as in fifty-fifty, hush- hush and never-never; more often there is a slight phonological change in the repeated element, as in helter- skelter, dilly-dally, higgledy-piggledy, teeny-weeny, hanky-panky and shilly-shally 4. Suppletion A morpheme is replaced with an entirely different one to indicate specific grammatical features: Io vado ‘I go’ → noi andiamo ‘we go’. The root vad- is swapped and- to form the first person plural. Vado and andiamo come from two different Latin verbs: vadere ‘to go fast’ and ambulare ‘to walk’. Exercise: inflection. Is it an example of affixation, internal change or suppletion? - Mouse-mice → internal change - Record-recorded → affixation - Dive – dove → internal change - Go – went → suppletion - Is – was → suppletion - Arrive – arrived → affixation - Start – started → affixation - Good – better → suppletion - Try – tried → affixation - Eat – ate → internal change - Am – are → suppletion - Take – took → internal change - Man – men → internal change - Discuss – discussed → affixation Consider the following data from Samoan ([ʔ] is a glottal stop). a) mate ‘he dies’ – mamate ‘they die’ b) nofo ‘he stays’ – nonofo ‘they stay’ c) galue ‘he works’ – galulue ‘they work’ d) tanu ‘he buries’ – tatanu ‘they bury’ e) alofa ‘he loves’ – alolofa ‘they love’ f) taʔoto ‘he lies’ – taʔoʔoto ‘they lie’ g) atamaʔi ‘he is intelligent’ – atamamaʔi ‘they are intelligent’ What morphological process is used to express the inflectional contrast between singular and plural here? Reduplication. If ‘he is strong’ is malosi in Samoan, how would you say ‘they are strong’? Malolosi. Derivation Derivation is the creation of a new word by adding a derivational affix to an existing word, in order to produce change in meaning and/or lexical category. E.g., happy + prefix un- → unhappy; + suffix -ness → happiness. Exercise: For each sentence, state whether the highlighted morphemes are inflectional or derivational - She is playing the piano. inflectional - She gave the boy’s father a note. inflectional - The painter arrived late derivational inflectional - He used his phone to check the weather inflectional - Her happiness was sincere derivational - She always remembers to call inflectional - The farmer’s cows escaped derivational inflectional - She quickly closed the book derivational inflectional - Mark needs the newer copy inflectional - The strongest rower continued inflectional derivational - She noted his impoliteness inflectional derivational Derivation is a widespread mechanism present in numerous languages. Why? Derivation is highly efficient, it expands the vocabulary without the need for excessive memorization: the meaning can be deduced simply by recognizing the base and affix. Prefixation and suffixation Evaluative suffixation (vezzeggiativi) Evaluative suffixation does not alter the lexical category or meaning of the base word: it allows the speaker to express an opinion (evaluation). Not common in English, even if a few diminutive suffixes can be identified. E.g. pig + -y → piggy; duck + -ling → duckling; book + -let → booklet. Words containing an evaluative suffix may undergo lexicalization: loss of connection between the base and derived word. E.g. spago ‘string’ + evaluative suffix -etto → spaghetto ‘little string’; nobody thinks of it like that: it is no longer perceived as a derived form. Words can undergo multiple derivational processes: they can contain several derivation affixes. Affixes are added one at a time: derivation is a linear process. E.g., faith → faithful → unfaithful . But faith → unfaithful . Complex words Analysis of complex words: 1. Identify the root = the lexical morpheme responsible for conveying the main meaning. rewrite, teacher, unhappiness. 2. Divide the word into morphemes. Rewrite → re+write, teacher → teach+er, unhappiness → un+happy+ness 3. Determine the affixation order. a. Only prefixes and suffixes: the affix closer to the root is added first. Help → helpful → helpfulness. b. both prefixes and suffixes: it’s complex. The order of affixation is determined by the selective nature of the derivational affixes: they usually attach to words belonging to a single lexical category. Un- primarily attaches to adjectives and can’t be added to nouns, therefore the order for the word unhappiness is: happy → unhappy → unhappiness. De- only applies to verbs, so dehumidifier: humid → humidify → dehumidify → dehumidifier 02/05/23 Exercise 5: Identify the root, and all derivational affixes, classify them as prefixes and suffixes - Privatize → private-ize - Happily → happy-ly - Player → play-er - Amoral → a-moral - Untie → un-tie - Lovable → love-able - Devalue → de-value - Unbelievable → un-believe-able - Unresourceful → un-resource-ful - Disinvestment → dis-invest-ment - Reseller → re-sell-er - Pretreatment → pre-treat-ment - Unimportantly → un-important-ly - Disobey → dis-obey - Unsuccessfully → un-success-full-ly - Disrespectful → dis-respect-ful - Dislike → dis-like If you have a change in meaning and category the affix is derivational, otherwise it’s inflectional. Affixation is linear, there’s an order for adding prefixes or suffixes: for example for successfully , you add before ful and then ly, but for unsuccessfully. In this case the prefix un is the one that is usually related to adjectives, which negates the meaning (and not the reversion of the meaning such as for the un- used for the verbs). Considering that it’s a prefix that you attach to adjectives, you can’t put it first because success is a noun: so the order is success + ful, it becomes an adjective, you can add un+succeful, and then it becomes an adverb by adding -ly: unsuccessfully. (he won’t ask the order) Word formation - Donation → from French → donate - Editor→from latin → edit - Resurrection → from French → resurrect - Sculptor → from latin → sculpt Backformation Affixation is a common way to form new words, it’s common in English, they are so commonly used that people can see them even when they are not present. In these cases, these words are not derived by suffixation ion and or are not suffixes, these words are created with backformation: creation of a new word by removing a supposed affix from an existing one. For example, edit does not generate editor, but editor, from latin is the reason why edit exists, people removed the ending thinking it was a suffix and they created a new verb. Compounding Compounding: compounds combine two or more lexical morphemes; it’s commonly found in Italian and extensively used in Germanic languages. Unlike derived words, which have only one lexical morpheme, compounds have at leas two, we could also say they are the combination of two roots. e.g. noun+adjective: headstrong, noun+noun: toenail, adj+adj: bittersweet, preposition+noun: oversight, verb+noun: drawbridge (verbs are rarely used in compounding), verb+noun: swearword. e.g. (Italian) verb compounds are common: portaombrelli, portalettere, lavapiatti, scolapasta. Noun+noun: ferrovia, noun+adjective: cassaforte, adj+adj: agrodolce. Regardless of their written form, they are all compounds: coffee table, coast guard, man-made, made-up, giallo verde, verde bottiglia. The separation is less common, and in Italian the hyphen is usually avoided. Recursive nature of compounding: in Germanic languages compounds can act as bases for further compounding, in Italian (and romance languages) it is usually not allowed, meaning that you can’t compound more morphemes to compounds, you can derive the compound with a grammatical morpheme though. For example: finance committee can become finance committee secretary, finance committee secretary election. 05/05/23 To identify the head of a compound you have to ask what is it? Is a living room a “living” or a “room”? It’s a room, then room is the head. What’s seafood? A type of food, then food is the head. The head determines the lexical category of the entire compound. - board (noun) → blackboard (noun) - cold (adj.) → ice-cold (adj.) - cassa (noun) → cassaforte (noun) - giallo (adj.) → giallo limone (adj.) The head of a compound not only conveys the main meaning, but also determines the part of speech. exocentric compounds have a non- compositional meaning. Buy: bɔm, negation: -wɛɛ, he/she: ɑ-, they: ye-, recent past: -ko, I: nye-, we: sɛ-, remote past: -mɛ, you: ɔ-, you (pl): nɛ-. How would you say the following: I bought: nyebɔmko, I didn’t buy: nyebɔmkowɛɛ, they bought: yebɔmmɛ. Exercise: Indonesian Tolong (help) tolong-menolong (help each other) Pukul (hit) pukul-memukul Kunjung (visit) kunjung-meŋunjung Peluk (embrace) peluk-memeluk Telpon (telephone) telpon-menelpon Derive the rule for forming the reciprocal: the root is reduplicated, then a prefix meN- is added to it. The capital N means that there is a nasal which assimilates to the place of articulation of the first consonant of the root, which is then dropped. Tolong: the initial t- is replaced by the prefix men- ([t] and [n] are alveolar). Pukul: p- is replaced by mem- ([p] and [m] are bilabials). Kunjung: [k] is replaced by meŋ- ([k] and [ŋ] are velars). Form the reciprocal form: Tikam-menikam, Pinjam-meminjam, Tawar-menawar. Test morphology review 1. Which of the following morpheme types applies to English –en as in eaten, bitten? a. derivational b. inflectional c. circumfix d. free 2. Which of the following morpheme types applies to English –tion as in application, deletion, celebration? a. inflectional b. derivational c. circumflex d. free 3. If an affix changes the lexical category of the root, it must be what type of affix? a. derivational b. inflectional c. lexical d. free 4. Case markers are a type of morpheme that: a. indicate the syntactic role of a word b. create nouns c. create verbs d. add a meaning of ‘cause’ or ‘make’ to an action Feedback 5. Morphemes are: a. the smallest recurrent sound units of a language b. the largest recurrent sound units of a language c. the smallest recurrent meaningful units of a language d. the largest recurrent meaningful units of a language. 6. Derivational morphemes when added to a root might: a. change the meaning of the root b. change the part of speech of the root c. never change the meaning or part of speech of the root d. a and b 7. If you divide reviewed into its component morphemes, the root would be: a. re- b. review c. view d. viewed 8. Variations of a morpheme are called: a. allomorphs b. allophones c. inflectional morphemes d. contextual 9. The word radar is: a. a clipped word b. an acronym c. a compound word d. the result of back- formation 10. The word photo is: a. a clipped word b. an acronym c. a compound word d. the result of back- formation 11. The word sunshine is: a. a clipped word b. an acronym c. a compound word d. the result of back- formation 12. Consider the English word sales as in “We must increase sales.” The final “s” is: a. an inflectional free morpheme b. a derivational free morpheme c. an inflectional bound morpheme d. a derivational bound morpheme 13. A bound morpheme cannot stand by itself: it must be attached to another morpheme. a. True b. False 14. In English, roots are always bound morphemes. a. True b. False 15. The head of a compound is similar to its topic, that is, the main, most general, or core meaning of the compound. a. True b. False 16. All the morphemes in the word books are free morphemes. a. True b. False 17. The –s in books is an inflectional morpheme. a. True b. False 18. The word reappearance is made up of two morphemes. a. True b. False 19. The word schoolbags is made up of three morphemes. a. True b. False 20. Inflectional morphemes, like derivational morphemes, change the part of speech of a word, but never change its meaning. a. True b. False 21. The un- in unsatisfactory is an inflectional morpheme. a. True b. False 22. Every morpheme is also a phoneme. a. True b. False 23. A morpheme that refers to an object, idea, or action is named: a. grammatical b. free c. lexical d. bound 24. A morpheme that can stand alone as a word is named: a. grammatical b. free c. lexical d. bound 25. Infixes occur around another morpheme. a. True b. False 26. Complex words are always composed of: a. a free morpheme b. two lexical morphemes c. a lexical and a grammatical morpheme d. more than one morpheme 27. Derivational morphology involves: a. the creation of new words from existing one b. the creation of new words using free morphemes c. a change in the lexical category d. a change in the grammatical function 28. The tense of a verb is an example of: a. inherent inflection b. contextual inflection c. derivation d. compounding 29. In English, prefixes never change the lexical category of a word. a. True b. False 30. Sing/sang, sink/sank, drive/drove, rise/rose are examples of: a. affixation b. internal change c. reduplication d. suppletion 31. The substitution of a non-morphemic segment for another to indicate a grammatical contrast is called: a. affixation b. internal change c. reduplication d. suppletion 32. A change in the form of a word to convey grammatical information is: a. derivation b. inflection c. back-formation d. conversion 33. Steamboat is an example of: a. endocentric compound b. exocentric compound 34. The addition of a grammatical bound morpheme to a base is called: a. affixation b. reduplication c. allomorphy d. internal change. Solutions: 1. b, 2. B, 3. A, 4. A, 5. C, 6. D, 7. C, 8. A, 9. B, 10. A, 11. C, 12. C, 13. A, 14. B, 15. A, 16. B, 17. A, 18. B, 19. A, 20. B, 21. B, 22. B, 23. C, 24. B, 25. B, 26. D, 27. A, 28. A, 29. B, 30. B, 31. B, 32. B, 33. A, 34. A. Allomorphs Morphemes are the smallest meaningful linguistic unit. Unlike phonemes, they possess both form and meaning. However, they can be pronounced in multiple different ways, these variants are called allomorphs and they occur in complementary distribution. Allomorphs, like allophones, may be in either complementary distribution or free variation. Examples: • Complementary distribution: the allomorphs a [ə] and an [æn]. The former occurs when the following word begins with a consonant, the latter when it begins with a vowel. • Free variation: alternative realizations of the word exit as [ɛgzɪt] and [ɛkzɪt]; or off as [ɔ:f] and [ɒf]. Allomorphs are different realization of the same morpheme, often associated with specific phonetic contexts. For example, the indefinite article has 2 allomorphs: a before vowels and an before consonants: there is a single morpheme conveying this grammatical meaning, realized by two distinct allomorphs. The prefix -in has 4 allomorphs: in (inactive), im (impossibile) before a bilabial consonant, il (illegal), ir (irregular), the variation occurs due to phonetic reasons, specifically the process of assimilation. The same thing happens for the Italian prefix in- has 4 allomorphs: inattivo, impossibile, illegal, irregolare. A more difficult example is the plural: although it may appear that the plural morpheme is simply presented by the suffix -s, three distinct allomorphs are actually used [s], [z], [əz] → cats, dogs, judges. The selection depends on the phonetic context. Can you predict these contexts? What’s the reason behind this complementary distribution? S and z are fricatives alveolar sounds, s is voiceless and z is voiced. - [s] after voiceless sounds: cats, tops, pots, packs, cliffs. - [z] after voiced sounds: dogs, bags, clothes, rails. - [əz] after sibilants: include alveolar and post-alveolar fricative consonants /s, z, ʃ, ʤ, ʧ/. Judges, classes, cages. The motivation is the tendency to minimize articulatory effort while maximizing perceptual distinctness. Words need to be easy to pronounce while still being clearly recognizable. [s], [z] after voiced or voiceless sounds: the vocal folds don’t need to change their configurations. [əz] after [s] and [z] ensures clarity, making the plural forms easier to perceive. Phonological allomorphs: very similar phonologically. E.g., English plural allomorphs /s/, /z/, /əz/. Suppletive allomorphs: phonologically different. E.g., The derived comparative and superlative forms of good are better and best, with the regular derivational suffixes -er and -(e)st. However, these suffixes are not attached to good to give gooder and goodest, therefore be- bet- are allomorphs of good. Conditioning factors: factors that determine which allomorph of a morpheme you use. • Phonological conditioning: different allomorphs are selected according to the phonological environment (e.g., the choice between a and an). • Lexical conditioning: the choice of allomorph depends on the particular word the morpheme is attached to. (e.g., irregular plurals with -n: children. Past participle with -en or -ed: given, finished). • Morphological conditioning: the grammatical rather than lexical morphemes condition the presence of the allomorph. 12/05/23 16/05/23 Loan translation or calques Loan translation or calques are word-for-word translations of compound and phrases from a source language. E.g., brainwashing is a calque from Chinese xi nao, rainforest is a calque from German regenwald; masterpiece is a calque from Dutch meesterstuk, wisdom tooth is a calque from Latin dentes sapientiae, and flea market is a calque from French marché aux puces. The word calque itself is an example of loanword from French meaning copy, the French word is derived from calcaire that is a loan itself from Latin. Why borrow words? borrowing is a byproduct of contact between population, exchange of knowledge, product trade and spread of ideas. They are used to name referents associated with another culture or a new technology. The prestige of a population and its language also plays a crucial role, for example that happens in Italian with English words. Non-essential words are borrowed just for sake of imitation to elevate one’s own language. This tendency is particularly evident in contemporary Italian, where English words are often used to express meanings already conveyed by existing Italian words: baby sitter, record, news, train manager, act, audience… are all loanwords that have replaced, or are in the process of replacing, the original Italian words: bambinaia, primato, capotreno, decreto legge, pubblico. In addition to being common in the scientific and technological field, English loanwords are also frequent in administrative and institutional communication and in the business sector. Some examples of these loanwords are asset, authority, caregiver, compliance, facility, flat tax, governance, jobs act, know-how, manager, mission, price cap, procurement, smart-working, spending review, stakeholder. Another significant example is the term greenpass, used in Italy for the covid- 19 vaccination certificate. This is a clear instance of a word that mimics English not out of necessity but solely for the sake of prestige, in a clumsy attempt at internationalization. It is ironic that, in this specific case, the use of an English word is not even a borrowing from the European documentation, but rather a choice made by Italian bureaucrats. To sum up, the adoption of loanwords Is not a simple or straightforward process, and it is not always driven by necessity. Rather, it involves cultural exchanges, language prestige, and the desire to be recognizes as part of an international community. English loanwords Loanwords are common in English, approximately 60% are borrowed from French and Latin. - 900-1000: Germanic tribes from Denmark introduced many Danish words. egg, sky, sister, thing. - 1066: Norman invasion, French became the second language for many inhabitants, resulting in the adoption of numerous loanwords. Aunt, calendar, cost, duke, easy, labour, rent, uncle. - 1000-1700: Significant borrowings from Latin and Greek in the scientific, legal and philosophical domains. Gravity, history, legal, solar. - Colonization of America: adoption of many words from native American languages, mostly through Spanish. (names for plants) Maize, tobacco, tomato, (names for animals) caribou, moose, skunk. - Colonization of Australia: over 200 words were borrowed from Australian languages. Boomerang, dingo, kangaroo, koala. Languages that contributed to English: Examples: - Caravan → French: carouane/Italian: carovana < Persian: karavan = “company of travelers”. - Tea → Amoy dialect (China): te. - Ski → Nowegian: ski. - Pajamas → Urdu: pay-jama < Persian : pay-jama = “trousers”. - Tycoon → Japanese = “great lord”. 19/05/23 Lexicon of a language – mental lexicon Highly educated individuals know around 40 000 lexemes, while the average native speaker knows approximately 20 000. The words known by a person are stored in their mental lexicon. It is highly efficient and organized: within a fifth of a second from the beginning of a spoken word, it can be recognized by our brain. It contains: • Roots and bound morphemes. • Semantic, grammatical, phonetic, and graphic information. • Morphological rules and processes used to create and understand new words. • Irregular inflectional word forms: they can’t be predicted. • Idioms (kick the bucket, know by heart, kill time): their meaning cannot be inferred from the meanings of the individual words involved. The mental lexicon is a structured network of words linked by various associations, from connection between their meanings to their co-occurrence in specific contexts. • Domain specific vocabulary: words associated with a particular situation or field; since they frequently occur together, they are linked in the mental lexicon, making them easier to retrieve. • Lexical field: words that have a semantic link. o Non branching: words that just share a significant aspect of their meaning. Ocean, sea, lake, pond, puddle; scorching, hot, warm, lukewarm, cool, cold. o Branching: taxonomy, characterized by clearly identifiable levels. • Word family: words derived from a particular root. Nation: national, nationally, nationalize, nationality, nationalism, nationalist, international…. 23/05/23 How to classify lexicon (mostly read but not necessary to study) The lexicon of a language is a diverse, intricate and ever-changing entity. In order to effectively describe it, it is essential to establish criteria that facilitate the classification of words into broader groups. We will refer to: - Frequency of use: how frequently a word is used, commonly used words and less commonly used. - Context of use: inclusion in domain-specific lexicon or not. - Origin: words that originate from within the language and words that are borrowed. Italian Language - Tullio de Mauro Words occur with different frequency; some appear in almost every written and spoke text, others are rarely used due to their highly contextualized and specific meanings. These aspects have been studied by Tullio de Mauro, who created the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana and the Vocabolario di Base della lingua italiana. He answered the following questions: which words are universally known among Italian speakers? What constitutes the average mental lexicon? To answer this query, De Mauro identified the most frequent words across a diverse range of texts. The assumption was: the knowledge of frequently used words is widespread. However, certain words are infrequently used but still widely recognized. The solution: assessment of the comprehension of lists of words by a sample of individuals. The current vocabulary The current vocabulary is the representation of the mental lexicon on an average Italian speaker, approximately of 52 000 words. The core of Italian lexicon. Two main categories: the basic and the common vocabulary. Basic vocabulary: essential for effective communication, are known by those who have completed middle school. Three distinct sections according to the frequency of use, and as a consequence the knowledge: • Fundamental vocabulary: 2000 words, the most frequently used, they account for 85% of an average written or spoken text. It includes conjunction, articles, pronouns, and prepositions, as well as some verbs, nouns, adjectives that have general meaning (andare, vedere, casa, pranzo, bello…) • High-usage vocabulary: contains around 3000 words that make up between 6%-8% of an average text. While they are less frequent they are still widely used in everyday communication. • High-availability vocabulary: 2000 words that are not frequently used by still known by most speakers. (antipasto, forchetta, ombrello, pantofola). Common vocabulary: approximately 45 000 words known by individuals with a higher level of education. It does not include the terminology of specialised topics, however it encompasses certain technical and scientific concepts that may be familiar even if not fully mastered (insulina, orbita, radiografia). The current vocabulary is a small portion of the Italian language. • English contributed nearly 8 000 loanwords. Almost 90% of these borrowings occurred after the 2nd World war (they are recent borrowings). Some loanwords date back to the XIX century: colonizzazione, fuorilegge, locomotive, meeting, tunnel, vagone. 26/05/23 30/05/23 06/05/23 Word grouping Word families Another type of grouping of associated words is the word family. A word family is composed of all the words derived from a given root. E.g., nation, national, nationally, nationalize, nationalism, nationality…. Domain specific vocabulary The vocabulary appropriate to a particular situation. E.g., race meeting vocabulary: horse, jockey, stable-boy, trainer, course, race, reins… A broad grouping like this is composed of a number of nested subdomanins. Layers of vocabulary Larger grouping of words, which are confined to certain areas of usage. For instance, there are technical vocabularies, there are also collection of words which associate together at different levels of formality. The mental lexicon Inventory of all the words we know in our cognitive system. The number is estimated to be around 150 000 and 250 000 for an average adult speaker. Every person’s mental lexicon is different from everyone else’s, yet we manage to understand each other, this indicated an adequate degree of overlap between individual lexicons. Vocabularies The total lexical stock of a language, which covers all its speakers. The natural home for such a vocabulary is the dictionary, and the natural way of drawing it up is by studying corpuses. The contents of a dictionary do not correspond to SEMANTICS Semantics is the brand of linguistics that explores the literal meaning embedded within words, phrases and sentences. Meanings encoded within the context of a language system. We will focus on lexical semantics. Meaning Meaning is the content conveyed in communication, the message or thought in the mind of a speaker encoded in language and decoded by a hearer. But, what’s exactly the nature of meaning? An option is to think of meaning in terms of reference: the connection between the language and a referent, which is something that exists outside language itself. The “things” we are talking about. However, there is more to meaning than just reference. Referential meaning: component of meaning that associates a word with a specific referent. E.g., Mark studied. → Mark refers to a person named Mark, studied refers to an action Mark performed. Reference is not limited to tangible entities: mermaids, freedom, hornless-unicorn. Identifying the referent is not always sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of a word. e.g., dog ∼ doggy ∼ canine refer to the same entity, and yet a distinction in meaning can be observed. What exactly sets these words apart? How is their meaning different? Denotation vs connotation Denotation is the component of meaning that indicates the specific thing, state, or event to which a linguistic expression refers. As such, it is primarily objective in nature and is agreed upon by all speakers of a language. Essentially, It represents the referential meaning of a word, morpheme or sentence. In contrast, connotation encompasses all the non-referential effect that can arise from the use a linguistic expression, such as particular attitudes or emotional overtones. Connotations can differ according to a person’s attitudes. Consider the words: dog ∼ doggy ∼ canine, they all denote the same referent, but exhibit different connotations, they have the same denotation but differ in their connotation. What connotations do these words evoke? What associations or emotions are attached to them? Connotation is not strictly related to a word itself, but it is rather influenced by personal, social and cultural factors. E.g.: different connotations of the word war for different individuals based on their attitudes and experiences. Connotations can be important in language acquisition and change; over time a connotation can become so firmly attached to a sign that it becomes a part of its sense, in the process perhaps replacing aspects of the earlier sense. For instance, for many speakers of English the word dork has just the sense ‘stupid or contemptible person’, with an implicit negative appraisal. The word first appeared as a slang term for ‘penis’; the attitudinal component was a connotation that came to stick, ousting the original meaning. Consequently, while the denotation of a word is commonly accepted and relatively stable, its connotation is more fluid and subject to interpretations according to an individual’s attitude. Nevertheless, connotation is not purely subjective: even though it is experienced subjectively, it possesses a conventional component shared within a community. In conclusion, the denotative meaning of a word is neutral and objective as it simply identifies an object or a concept. On the other hand, connotation describes additional components of meaning that are non- objective, as they express affective or symbolic values that extend beyond mere reference. Consider the word mom as an example: it denotes a female parent, and that’s the core meaning of the word; however, when spoken, it also evokes affective and emotional connotations that go beyond the simple identification of the referent. This property becomes particularly clear if the word mom is compared to mother. Polysemy Polysemy refers to the capacity of words of possessing two or more interconnected meanings. It’s the norm for the majority of lexemes. The distinct meanings must be both separate and interconnected. E.g.: bitter - ‘unpleasantly sharp taste’ → this coffee tastes very bitter. - ‘something that causes pain or anger’ → Linguistics was a bitter disappointment - ‘someone who experiences pain or anger’ → I feel very bitter about what happened. These are distinct meanings that share a common thread. How are they connected? Homonymy Two different lexemes sometimes accidentally share the same phonological form; this is called homophony or homonymy, and the words are said to be homophones. Homonyms are words that sound and/or are spelled the same but have different meanings. The formal similarity is coincidental, and the meanings are not related. Homophones and homographs: - bark ‘outer covering of a tree’ – bark ‘noise made by dogs’ - bank ‘organization that manage money’ – bank ‘edge of a river’ homophones but not homographs: - boy ‘young male’ - buoy ‘floating object used for directing ships’ homographs but not homophones: - tear ‘drop of liquid from the eyes’ - tear ‘hole in a piece of material’ Polysemy vs homonymy: A word is polysemic if it has developed multiple meanings overtime, homonymy refers to words that have coincidentally acquired a formal similarity. Literal and figurative meaning We do not always use an expression in its literal sense, the meaning actually encoded by its component lexical and grammatical signs. We can interpret an expression in a non-literal or figurative meaning. The figurative meaning can be considered to be an extension of the literal meaning. Three different process of meaning extension: • Metaphor: the sense of an expression is extended to another concept on the basis of a resemblance. • Metonymy: the sense is extended to another concept via a typical or habitual association. E.g., He’s fond of the bottle. • Synecdoche: the sense is extended via a part–whole relation. e.g., wheels = car The different meanings of a word or a linguistic expression are often connected through metaphor or metonymy. E.g., lend me your ears: the association of “ears” with “attention” is metonymic; the verb "lend" is used metaphorically. Metaphorical extensions are frequently observed in polysemous terms, there is often a transition from concrete experiences to abstract domains. • colour terms can represent emotions (feeling blue); • perception verbs can describe thoughts (I see what you mean ∼ she felt certain); • meanings that refer to body parts can extend to spatial relations (the head of the line). • the concept of "difficulty" can be understood in terms of heaviness or hardness: we refer to challenging problems as hard or tough, weighty or heavy. Semantic relationship The semantic connections between words contribute to the organization of the mental lexicon and facilitate the retrieval of words and their meanings. Three main types: • similarity (synonymy); 17. The referent of a noun can be an abstract concept. V/F 18. Pretty and beautiful are homonyms. V/F 19. The relation between a linguistic expression and things in the world that are associated with that expression is named. A. Reference, b. Sense, c. Sign, d. Connotation. 20. Define the semantic relation between husband – wife. A. synonymy, b. gradable antonymy, c. hyponymy, d. reverse antonymy, e. complementary antonymy, f. converse antonymy. 21. Define the semantic relation between rich – poor. A. synonymy, b. gradable antonymy, c. hyponymy, d. reverse antonymy, e. complementary antonymy, f. converse antonymy. 22. Define the semantic relation between long -short. A. synonymy, b. gradable antonymy, c. hyponymy, d. reverse antonymy, e. complementary antonymy, f. converse antonymy. 23. Define the semantic relation between real – genuine. A. synonymy, b. gradable antonymy, c. hyponymy, d. reverse antonymy, e. complementary antonymy, f. converse antonymy. 24. Define the semantic relation between sedan – car. A. synonymy, b. gradable antonymy, c. hyponymy, d. reverse antonymy, e. complementary antonymy, f. converse antonymy. 25. Define the semantic relation between sad – grim. A. synonymy, b. gradable antonymy, c. hyponymy, d. reverse antonymy, e. complementary antonymy, f. converse antonymy. 26. Define the semantic relation between hammer – tool. A. synonymy, b. gradable antonymy, c. hyponymy, d. reverse antonymy, e. complementary antonymy, f. converse antonymy. 27. The relation of having opposite meanings. A. antonymy, b. polysemy, c. hyponymy, d. metonymy 28. The relationship of having a more specific meaning or being a subtype is referred to as A. polysemy, b. antonymy, c. synonymy, d. hyponymy. 29. Words that have opposite meanings are called. A. homonyms, b. hyponyms, c. antonyms, d. synonyms. 30. Connotation is: a. the similarity of meaning between two or more lexemes, b. any effect, value, or emotion associated with a linguistic expression, c. the conventional meaning of a linguistic expression, d. the relation between a linguistic expression and extralinguistic entity. 31. Polysemy is: a. the relation between a specific meaning and a more general one, b. the property of having multiple interconnected meanings, c. the relation between two words having different meanings, d. all of the above. Solutions: 1. V, 2. F, 3. V, 4. V, 5. V, 6. F, 7. F, 8. V, 9. F, 10. A, 11. B, 12. C, 13. B, 14. C, 15. A, 16. V, 17. V, 18.F, 19. A, 20. F, 21. B, 22. B, 23. A, 24. C, 25. A, 26. C, 27. A, 28. D, 29. C, 30. B, 31. B, PRAGMATICS We communicate by exchanging signals: words, signs gestures, facial expressions and so on. The relationship between the signals and the meanings is agreed by all the members of a particular group of people, the speech community. Shannon and Weaver: communication takes place as a result of a message being successfully encoded, transmitted and decoded. The signals cannot be correctly identified when there are physical disturbances called “noise”. However, the signals we use are systematically ambiguous. In these cases we rely on lexical semantics (what we know about the meaning), syntax (how words are put together) and compositional semantics (the meaning according to the words are arranged). Sometimes this is not enough to understand and what the speaker is trying to communicate depends on the situation. This also simplify communication in some cases, allowing us to communicate meanings saying very little or nothing at all. It is so common that speakers mean more than they explicitly say, that this kind of enrichment of meaning are common in language use and it would seem odd for a hearer to miss out or interpret an utterance in accordance purely with its semantic meaning. Bach and Harnish: we need to think about the speaker’s intention to distinguish the cases where they mean something extra from the cases in which they don’t. What else helps us understand what the speaker intends to convey? Context. The discipline of pragmatics is concerned with meaning that go beyond those that are usually – semantically – associated with the signals that are being used in communication. Pragmatics is concerned with meaning in context. Beyond semantics A sentence can convey much more than its literal, compositional meaning. A: Can you cook? B: I know how to put a kettle on. What does B's response mean? - According to its idiomatic semantic meaning, it communicates B’s ability to boil water. - Considered as an answer to “can you cook?” it communicates that B can’t cook. Why didn’t the speaker opt for a straightforward 'no' as a response? Why did B respond indirectly by mentioning the action of putting a kettle on, instead of directly informing about their cooking ability? How can we understand the intended meaning even though it is not explicitly stated? Ellipsis Ellipsis refers to situations where speakers omit certain information, relying on listeners to infer them. A: Do you want some milk in your coffee? B: I’m lactose intolerant. From a semantic standpoint, the response is irrelevant. A part of the message is implied but not explicitly stated. The missing part of the response needs to be inferred by A: I don’t want milk in my coffee because I’m lactose intolerant and I can’t drink it. Irony If I say that went well when commenting on the defeat of the football team I support, you are likely to infer the actual meaning as that went badly. Comprehension is possible even when words that convey the opposite of the intended meaning are used. Ambiguity A: how are you going to pay for the ticket? B: I have a credit card. A: I can lend you money for the ticket. B: I have a credit card. A: I don’t have money to pay for the ticket. B: I have a credit card. In each scenario, I have a credit card, communicates something different. There is an additional layer beyond semantics that influences meaning. In conclusion, semantics plays a crucial role in conveying meaning, but not all meaning is confined to a literal interpretation. - How can we differentiate between literal and non-literal meanings? - If we can't solely rely on the words themselves, what other factors contribute to our understanding of the speaker's intended meaning? - How can we accurately interpret indirect, metaphorical, and ironic messages, and fill in the gaps left by an ellipsis? The context. Pragmatics Pragmatics studies concrete uses of language, seeking to explain how extralinguistic factors contribute to the communication of non-literal meanings. It examines the specific meaning acquired in a particular context, emphasizing the circumstances in which language is used and the role of the interlocutors. the goal of pragmatics is to understand the cognitive abilities that speakers and hearers can employ when conveying and understanding meaning in context, what we call their pragmatic competence. Sentence vs utterance A sentence is an abstract linguistic entity possessing a morpho-syntactic structure and capable of expressing a complete thought [simplified definition]. When a sentence is spoken or written in a specific instance, it is considered an utterance. An utterance is a unit of speech, produced by an actual speaker in a particular context. The sentence meaning is invariant, though the utterance meaning changes. The investigation of sentence meaning – and the meanings of the various signs making up sentences – is called semantics. The study of utterance meaning is called pragmatics. Pragmatics deals with the specific meaning of actual instances of language use, that is, with the meaning conveyed by a linguistic expression in a particular context of speech. By referring to utterances, we shift our focus from the abstract structures of language to actual instances of communication. Context • Situation: setting in which the communication takes place. Observable elements and surroundings that influence communication. E.g.: the context of this lecture… • Co-text: what has been said prior to a given sentence. E.g.: He wasn’t very happy about that! vs Mark didn’t pass the exam. He wasn’t very happy about that! • Background knowledge: o Cultural knowledge E.g.: A: Do you want milk in your coffee? B: I’m lactose intolerant. o Interpersonal knowledge E.g.: A: I'm having a birthday party at my house on Saturday, will you be there? B: I will bring my swimsuit. - He gave me one more chapter to study. - Last week, the prime minister was in Japan. Referring relies on collaboration between interlocutors. This collaboration strives for the least effort, with all participants sharing the cognitive load without being overwhelmed. The aim is to exchange as little information as possible while still ensuring effective communication. The exact amount of information required depends on the common ground between the speaker and the listeners. Clark and Wilkes Gibbs – director-matcher task • When two people refer multiple times to the same referent, they tend to use less and less words to identify it. The shortening of referring expressions is made possible by the collaborative nature of the referring process. → economy of the language. • Speakers and addressees try to minimize collaborative effort, the work both speakers and addressees do from the initiation of the referential process to its completion. The speaker, when shortening the referring expression, has to take into account the possibility that this will require effortful and time- consuming clarification before it can be successfully understood by the hearer. Brennan and Clark argued that this process often reflects the formation of a conceptual pact: a temporary agreement about how a speaker and their addressees are going to conceptualize an object. After reaching an implicit agreement, they converge on a single expression, avoiding misunderstanding. But, 1) making our referring expressions shorter once we know they are going to work, and 2) making implicit agreements about keeping the referring expressions stable, could be considered conflicting requirements. However, the conceptual pact is still respected if we consider that by shortening the referring expressions we keep appealing to a stable notion. (e.g., the ice skater) 1. The next one looks like a person who’s ice skating, except they’re sticking two arms out front. 2. The next one’s the person ice skating that has two arms? 3. The fourth one is the person ice skating, with two arms. 4. The next one’s the ice skater. 5. The ice skater. So, referring is a collaborative process and the referring expressions are the consequence of negotiation during the conversation. Furthermore, in order to use ambiguous referring expressions successfully, we need information about the hearer’s knowledge, it’s necessary an understanding of the common ground. The speaker needs to know that the speaker and the hearer mutually know the relevant referent. How? From shared prior experience, by being co-members of the same community. Implicatures How can we recognize the presence of non-literal meanings and understand them? Grice studied a class of meanings that go beyond the semantic content of what is said and called them conversational implicatures. Conversational implicatures: additional meanings conveyed beyond the semantic content of a sentence. They are not explicitly stated by the speaker, but rather implicated. They are dependent on the context. E.g.: A: How was the food? B: It didn't make me sick. → conversational implicature: the dinner was not very good. How do we determine whether something should be interpreted literally or not? How does a speaker manage to convey meanings not directly implied by their words? We hold certain expectations regarding how communication works. When communication deviates from regular patterns, we seek explanations to make sense of it. We speculate about the speaker's intention to convey implied meaning beyond the literal content and search for a relevant conversational implicature. Implicatures are the meanings that arise in the process to infer additional information from what the speaker intends to communicate. They concern how hearers tend to interpret particular utterances. - Grice: a cover term for any kind of meaning that is part of what a speaker implied, suggested or meant as opposed to what they actually said. e.g., Marta is poot but happy. The unsaid meanings are conventional implicatures: they are outside what is explicitly said and they are irrevocably attached to the words that give rise to them (but). They deal with meanings that go beyond what is literally said. But they don’t appear to rely on context. Conversational implicatures: are context-dependent, the hearer has to be able to recover the meaning that the speaker intends to communicate. The calculation of any conversational implicature relies upon the assumption that the speaker is observing the cooperative principle. A: I’d like to write to John. Where does he live? B: somewhere in France. B goes against the maxim of quantity not providing enough information, therefore, assuming that B is cooperative, we infer that he does not know his address. Relation based implicature: the requirement that a speaker’s utterance should be relevant to the current discourse purpose, invites the hearer to draw additional inferences about what the speaker means to convey. A: I’m out of petrol. B: there is a garage around the corner. B doesn’t need to spell out the details and A infers them. Manner implicature: if the speaker uses a ore verbose form of words, that suggests that they intend to convey a meaning that goes beyond a shorter sentence. John has caused the car to stop VS John stopped the car. Quantity implicatures: the speaker’s use of an utterance that appears to be wilfully underinformative in violation of the submaxim of quantity. A: did you meet jake’s parents? B: I met his mother. The speaker makes an assertion and thereby conveys falsity of an informationally stronger assertion that they could have made. It relies also on the maxim of quality, because we have to assume that the speaker is unwilling to make a false statement. Ignorance implicature: the speaker is take not to covey the falsity of a stronger position but just to convey their lack of certainty about the truth or falsity of that stronger position. Cooperative principle How do we think a prototypical conversation should be? Communication is a collaborative endeavour. Speakers strive to be cooperative, truthful, informative, relevant, and appropriate in their speech. Grice’s Cooperative principle «make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged». Speakers tend to align with a series of norms that Grice defines maxims and categorizes under four headings: quantity, quality, relation, and manner. Quantity 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. A: What is the exam for this teaching like? B: Like an exam. A: What is the exam for this teaching like? B: It starts with all the students gathering on campus outside the exam room. Then a lecturer opens the door and invites everybody into the room... Quality 1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Relation 1. Be relevant. A: Was the food good? B: It didn't make me sick Manner 1. Avoid obscurity of expression. 2. Avoid ambiguity (= avoid expressions where the intended meaning cannot be deduced from the context). 3. Be brief. 4. Be orderly. According to Grice, our general expectation is that a cooperative speaker will adhere to the cooperative principle, but the maxims are not rigid rules, rather guidelines we assume our interlocutor follows. They are merely generalisations about how we expect people to behave. There are instances where the maxims are openly not followed. When a speaker flouts a maxim, they violate it intentionally in order to convey additional meanings. When faced with seemingly uncooperative utterances, listeners still assume the speaker’s compliance to the cooperative principle. Consequently, they try to discern a meaning that aligns with the maxims. For example, A: how was the food? B: it didn’t make me sick. → it’s irrelevant from a semantic standpoint, it fails to align with the cooperative principle. Flouts the maxim of relation. The listeners assume that the speaker wants to communicate successfully; consequently, they suppose that there must be an implicature capable of providing an appropriate answer to their question. Listeners recognize when an answer lacks useful information and assume that there must be a way in which it aligns with the context, as expected by their internalized communication model. Consequently, they look for the implicature that conveys a coherent and appropriate meaning. On a Gricean account, the speaker is assumed to be pragmatically competent, both with respect to what they do and to what the hearer is going to do. practical terms, this enables the listeners to minimize cognitive effort by testing different interpretative hypotheses in order of accessibility, starting with the simplest and most straightforward interpretation, and gradually exploring more complex interpretations as needed. The process stops when a listener reaches an interpretation that generates sufficient cognitive effects, satisfying the expected level of relevance. At this point, they can assume they have retrieved the intended meaning communicated by the speaker. This decision is justified by the assumption that if the speaker had intended a different meaning that required more effort to understand, they would have chosen a more informative and relevant utterance for that specific meaning. In summary, when evaluating cognitive effects, we halt our analysis once the expectation of relevance is satisfied. The intended meaning corresponds to the first interpretation that satisfies the condition of optimal relevance, rather than being the most relevant interpretation possible. An example may be useful in better understanding the interpretative process. Consider the utterance “George has a big cat”. Given that the phrase “big cat” is ambiguous in English, how would you interpret the utterance? And why? The first interpretation that a person is likely to arrive at is that George has a large domestic cat – maybe a fat one. However, the utterance is also compatible with George having a pet tiger, as the phrase "big cat" could refer to wild felines; this alternative interpretation might even seem more relevant, because it can generate a greater cognitive effect. Nevertheless, taking into account the principle of relevance, we can dismiss the second interpretation, because if the speaker had intended to convey the meaning of George having a tiger, they would have used a more specific utterance like “George has a tiger”, to avoid placing a disproportionate cognitive burden on the listener. Therefore, the listener is justified in stopping their reasoning once they have reached the first relevant interpretation: George has a cat, and that cat is big. The principle of optimal relevance also applies to the speaker. They could have expressed the same meaning by saying, for example, "George has a big domestic feline”. However, the cognitive effort required to produce and process this utterance would not be justified by a proportional increase in positive cognitive effect, thus failing at achieving optimal relevance. Including such a level of detail is unnecessary, because the speaker knows that the listener can easily identify the correct referent given the context. There is one final issue we need to address to complete the representation of Sperber and Wilson's theory and differentiate it from Grice's model. Grice distinguished between "what is said," which represents the explicit meaning, and what is implicated, which includes additional meanings conveyed without being explicitly stated; however, he focused exclusively on the latter aspect. In contrast, Sperber and Wilson acknowledge the importance of pragmatic processes in understanding also what is explicitly communicated and, as a consequence, considering the context is deemed necessary to assign even a basic level of interpretation to an utterance. The reason why pragmatic considerations are essential to understand utterances stems from the fact that language is inherently ambiguous, and without pragmatic awareness it is impossible to resolve the meaning of many words and accurately identify the correct reference. Moreover, even after reference assignment and disambiguation, further enrichment may be necessary to access the explicit meaning of an utterance. Let's examine the sentence, It will take some time to repair your watch. If we solely rely on decoding and reference assignment, the interpretation we reach is a statement of the obvious, which lacks any meaningful relevance and therefore is not worth communicating – it is self-evident that repairing a watch requires a certain amount of time. A listener will generally understand that the repair will take a significant amount of time, to the extent that it is worth mentioning it; this information is included in what the speaker explicitly communicates, and yet this understanding requires an inference that goes beyond what is encoded in the sentence. To account for these necessary steps in interpretation, Sperber and Wilson introduced the concept of explicature. An explicature refers to what is explicitly said in an utterance, including its semantic content along with contextual information that primarily enable disambiguation and reference assignment. About this definition, it is important to note that explicatures pertain solely to “what is said”, the explicit meaning of an utterance, and doesn’t encompass any implicatures. Nevertheless, establishing an explicature relies on the pragmatic principle of relevance, which allows for the identification of the most relevant reference, and is context-dependent, meaning that the explicature of a sentence can vary across different contexts. Let's consider an utterance that exemplifies the dependence on context: Refuse to admit them. What does this utterance say? Without any contextual cues, it is impossible to provide even a basic interpretation. Now, consider the utterance as a response to What should I do if I make mistakes? or What should I do with people without a ticket? These questions provide a context for the utterance, creating two different explicatures and demonstrating how the comprehension of explicit and literal meanings requires the incorporation of both semantic and pragmatic elements. In summary, an explicature refers to the meaning derived from the process of developing the incomplete linguistic semantic form of an utterance. It represents the explicit meaning that is obtained by analysing the linguistic elements of the utterance and considering relevant contextual information. Speech acts An utterance in terms of the social action that it is used to perform. They are the very essence of language in use. It is frequently not obvious what kind of speech act is being performed, and there is no straightforward correspondence between speech acts and sentence types (imperative, interrogative, declarative). Austin – performatives and illocutionary force • Performative utterances: cannot be regarded as true or false, because they do not serve merely to state a fact, but to perform a social action. E.g., I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth. I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow. Various social conditions have to be in place, for example, naming a ship acquires sense during a ship-naming ceremony. The conditions that have to be satisfied in order for a performative utterance to be effective are the felicity conditions: o If the utterance is being made felicitously, it will be effective. o If the utterance is being made infelicitously, it won’t be effective. We can identify performatives by the verb, performative verbs are promise, name, bet, declare, apologise, resign, and they are usually used in the first person, with present time reference. According to the speakers’ intentions these utterances are performatives: o An explicit performative: I order you to get out. → vs non-performative: Get out! o I declare this supermarket open → vs non-performative: I am delighted to declare this supermarket open. o I apologize. / I resign. Austin introduced a three-way distinction: we can describe utterances at three levels. 1. Illocutionary effect: the effects that utterances bring about. The illocutionary act is the speech act performed. Someone declared the supermarket open describes the illocutionary effect of I declare this supermarket open. 2. Locutionary level: the locutionary act of performing an utterance is simply the fact these words having been said. Someone said “I declare this supermarket open”, describes the locutionary effect of I declare this supermarket open. 3. Perlocutionary level: perlocutionary effect are those which arise as a consequence of the corresponding locutionary or illocutionary act. Get out! Has the perlocutionary effect to make the addressee leave. Perlocutionary acts compel or persuade someone to adopt a course of action. For non-performative utterances, the most obvious indication of what kind of speech act is being performed might be the sentence type that is used. - Declarative: to make statements. The window is open. - Interrogative: to ask questions. Is the window open? - Imperative: to issue command or requests. Open the window. But this leaves a lot of different possibilities open. Gazdar proposed than the Literal Force Hypothesis, which suggests that every utterance has a literal illocutionary force which can be read off its surface form. It distinguishes: - Direct speech acts: the illocutionary force matches this syntactically driven expectation. - Indirect speech acts. E.g. could you pass the salt? It’s an indirect request. I’d like some salt. Indirect request that mentions the speaker’s wish. Will you pass the salt? Indirect request that mentions the hearer doing the action. May I have the salt? indirect request that questions the speaker’s permission to receive the results of the action. What if we don’t assume the literal force hypothesis? Levinson thinks that proceeding via literal force would be inefficient, given that many speech acts are indirect. The relation between sentence type and its illocutionary force is too inconsistent. Alternative approaches: cue-based approaches to speech act recognition. Rather than starting with assumptions about literal meaning and drawing further inferences about what the speaker is actually going to achieve, we can draw upon a wide range of cues to the speaker’s intention. Based on all the relevant factors, we decide which interpretation is preferable. Factors: - lexical choice and syntactic factors: (e.g., sorry. The utterance is probably an apology. Right at the end makes it more likely to be a check-question. Sure. The utterance is likely to be an acceptance). - Prosody: e.g., questions tend to have rising intonation. “upspeak”, when declarative sentences exhibit a late rise in intonation, they are probably check-questions. E.g., the use of the utterance yeah, as an agreement, as an affirmative answer and as a backchannel (confirm that you are paying attention): the intonation changes for each aim. - The context of the utterance: e.g., question and answer occur sequentially. → they are called adjacency pairs, other examples are: greeting-greeting, call-response, inform-acknowledge, offer- response. (the factor is turn adjacencies) - Higher-level dialogue considerations. Cue-based approaches have come to predominate the computational work that aims to build artificial dialogue systems. It takes into account the factors, incorporates them into a model, which can learn the associations between each of these factors and the speech act. In conclusion, language can be used to perform a range of social functions (greeting, questioning, thanking, apologizing) and complex and culturally specific actions (naming, marrying, sentencing…). The use of speech • The hourglass: the main facts are told in the 1st paragraph of the story, presented in order of decreasing importance. In the 2nd part the events are narrated in chronological order with: detail, dialogue, background information. The second part in introduced by a turn, a transition, like Police gave the following account of the accident…. o Topics: police stories, dramatic events, trials, chronological narration. • Narrative story-telling: typical in online media because of the unlimited space. Documented stories based on actual facts, written in chronological order, the first paragraph sets the scene, building on to the final climax. It blends reporting facts with the writing style of fiction to create powerful stories that promote reading through the end. o Written using codes and conventions of narrative. The process of story creation involves some key elements: ▪ A narrator that provides the point of view. ▪ A listener or an audience (real or implied) ▪ A structure of presentation of events (usually in chronological order) ▪ Core structure: disruption of a state of order, actions must be taken to re-establish the equilibrium. Ordered in 6 stages: • Abstract • Orientation • Complicating action • Evaluation • Resolution • Coda ▪ 1st person pronouns, past tense, descriptive and emotional language, details. ▪ People are described as real characters that live the events. Dialogue is used. o Origins: during the American Civil War, revitalized in 1960 with the birth of New Journalism. o Adopted for main feature stories, stories with high emotional impact (crime or trials). Impersonal writing Good reporting aims to be objective, emphasize facts, refrain from personal views and opinions. One way of doing it is using an impersonal style: - Avoiding 1st,2nd person pronouns. Using 3rd person pronouns: distance and descriptiveness. - Avoiding emotive words or expression that may imply an evaluation. They are acceptable in quotes. Strategies for connecting paragraphs Coherence: the smooth, logical flow of sentences within a paragraph and a series of paragraphs. Strategies to create coherent stories: - Coordination makes sentences easy to follow (they are preferred because easier to read), subordination increases grammatical complexity. - Repeating parallel structural patterns: repetition of the same subject+predicate structure (Smith ordered… Smith added….). - Linking paragraphs by means of the repetition of words, synonyms and conceptual equivalents. - Hooks: words and phrases that are repeated throughout an article to give a sense of unity. 7. The tools of the trade Linguistics strategies to compact lots of information in a short text. How to highlight information and convey a pov through verbs, sentence structure, active or passive voice. • The “kiss and tell” principle: Meaning Keep It Short and Simple AND TELL the story, therefore news are written in a simple and concise way, avoiding complex sentences and subordinates. Historical roots: 19th century, to keep down the cost of transmitting long texts over the telegraph. Today, this practice still remains to increase revenues and reduce costs. In online contents brevity is preferred by the reader who is often skimming web pages to collect information and due their lack of time. • Well packaged information: concision translates in a style that packs as much information as possible into a text as short as possible. Preferring nominal structures to verbal structures and the use of nominalizations and long, complex noun groups. o Nominalization enables actions or events to be described as entities, transforming verbs and adjectives into nouns. As a consequence the action becomes more abstract, short and flexible to manage in the construction of a sentence, but also more complex to understand. o Complex noun groups can be characterized as strings of words that together realize a syntactic-semantic unit. (proposed labour-market reforms  Reforms on the market of labour that have been proposed). They are often used because they create condensed structures containing a lot of information that can be packed and moved in the sentence. Typically found in text with severe space limitations. • Use of concise, plain language o Words that are not necessary or carry little meaning tend to be avoided (in order to → to; despite the fact → although; they made a decision → they decided) o Avoiding expressions that may be unfamiliar: slang, jargon, words of French or Latin origin. (dope, absurdity, construct…) o Avoiding words that are non-specific and preferring verbs with a strong descriptive meaning. (the camper was involved in an accident → the camper flipped on its side and burst into flames). • The passive voice: tendency to use dynamic, action verbs and to use the active voice rather than the passive voice. The active voice is preferred because the description of the action is more direct and easier to understand. Cases in which the passive voice is used: 1) when the performer of the action in unknown or irrelevant (office mail is now delivered twice a day), 2) to leaver the performer of the action unspecified to avoid ascribing responsibility (Mistakes were made…), and 3) as a strategy for organizing text around a particular figure or topic (the undergoer of the action is in the subject position), therefore creating a more coherent and cohesive text because it creates a conceptual link. • Use of syntax: syntax creates meaning. The ordering of elements determines the interpretation of the syntactic-semantic role played by the participants represented in the clause. The order can highlight or marginalize the presence and participation of event participants. Syntactic choices can be used to convey a pov, focusing onto or away from the agent or the affected. A distinction is made between two kinds of participants: o The agent: who actively brings about the event of the predicate, it’s consciously and deliberately involved in the realization of the process. o The affected: someone or something that undergoes the action or process. o The actor: the referent or subject of an active verb, but who has a less direct involvement in it. A participant who experiences an emotion or embodies a property. John hits the ball. → agent – process – affected. Susan went home → agent – process. The children looked sad. → actor – process. Action and relational verbs: action verbs express actions, relational verbs express relationship between entities. Action verbs can be transitive (involving an agent and an affected) and intransitive (indicating only one participant). o Transitive verbs express that an activity is transferred from an agent to an affected therefore attributing direct responsibility. So, transitive action verbs express blame. To fade this, one can use an inanimate entity as the subject. (Robber kills NYC jewellery store worker. / Bomb rocks Damascus as peace envoy meets Assad.) o Intransitive verbs avoid blame placing emphasis on the victims, presenting events as there is no external cause. (terror leaders die as prison revolt is crushed by police. / Man dies as violence breaks out…). Relational verbs express states of being or having, or set up relationships between things, or actors and their qualities. Examples: represent, show, reflect, exemplify, indicate, express, become, reveal, manifest, need, mean. o Frequently used in reporting, especially hard news. o Be, show, represent, mean, reveal →show events as objective truths, making it difficult to contest. (China manufacturing shows signs of recovering) Use of voice and thematization: using an active or passive voice affects the presentation of participants involved. (police detain asylum seekers VS asylum seekers are detained by police) whatever is placed in initial position in a sentence in emphasized. You can also not mention the agent: asylum seekers are detained, obfuscating and depersonalizing the responsibility. 8. Reporting information and evaluating likelihood Use of direct and indirect quotes or paraphrases to report sources’ words. the use of modality to express if the events are viewed as possible, likely, necessary or desirable. Encoding attitude and pov Linguistics choices reflect journalists’ individual view of the world and their desire to create consensus with their readers: choice of verbs and sentence structures highlight information and shift the readers attention. different reporting structures and expressions of modality allows journalists not to endorse the source, or to hit at their reservations. 1. Use of reported speech: to draw attention to, or deflect it, parts of the information contained in the sources’ words. to emphasize emotional and dramatic content, to create an impact, to de-emphasise controversial information. Two structures: direct speech and indirect speech. The idealized function of direct speech is to report speech in a manner true to its original wording, while the function of indirect speech is to report what was said but with different wording. Choosing one structure gives different degrees of flexibility in reporting their words: Use of words in news reporting British and American newspapers make extensive use of the flexibility of the English language, journalists have also introduced words in the vocabulary: e.g., bouncebackability (compounding: bounce + back + ability), boomerangst (compounding boomer + angst). Neologisms are a powerful tool because they allow journalists to express concepts in novel, appealing, incisive ways. However, it can come at expense of clarity contradicting one of the basic principles of news writing. - Some neologisms adopted in connection of wide-coverage events can be forgotten as soon as the coverage reduces and disappear. (e.g., in 2003 they used WMD to refer to weapons of mass destruction). - The frequent use of some words, words associations or metaphors may lead to the creation or clichés: overused phrases that lose their impact. E.g., tragic accident, brutal murder, sudden death, sweeping reforms, heated argument, proud parents, bare minimum, tip of the iceberg. - Journalists also extend the meaning of existing words: e.g., tweet. - Borrowing from other languages, usually in reports of foreign affairs. For example, they tend to refer to foreign political figures with a word from their language. E.g., Frau Angela Merkel, Monsieur Nicolas Sarkozy, Signor Gianfranco Fini. - Some borrowed words may become popular and spread into spoken language: vuvuzela. This strategy of extensive borrowing on one hand expands English vocabulary, but on the other hand it can cause comprehension problems to the readers. Use of words to convey pov The choice of words can reflect a particular viewpoint an influence the readership without explicitly commenting: particular adjectives and adverbs. E.g., shameless, hopeless. “visit by President Obama causes traffic headaches” emphasizes the frustration of local residents, criticizing the handling of the traffic. Irony in the news Irony is an important mechanism for establishing and reinforcing consensus between newspaper and readers. It consists in the use of words to convey a meaning that is opposite to, or ad odds with, their literal meaning. “What a great weather” while it’s raining. It rests on some form of shared understanding between the writer and the reader. Irony engages the reader and if understood it leads to a sense of satisfaction, therefore creating consensus. It’s a way of criticising without being harsh. Representing groups in the news: a way to reinforce stereotypes and promote attitudes The choice of words reflects the writer’s ideology and values, when used in the news are a powerful tool for establishing an ideological stance and promoting attitudes. Role of news and the media: - News are a source of information. - Media help people conceptualize the world. - Media shape people’s knowledge, beliefs, values, opinions, social relations and identity. - Media discourse both reflect and constructs the ideological system of the society in which it is produced: strategic control of the reader’s knowledge of events, and opinions is crucial. - Process of categorization and dichotomization: aimed at legitimizing the group insiders and delegitimizing outsiders. The dichotomy between us and them serves to polarize distinctions between good and bad, victims and aggressors, and to present events from particular angles. This can de-emphasize the responsibility or on the contrary put the blame on someone. Categorization and dichotomization creates and reinforces mental schemas, as well as social stereotypes: they contribute perpetuating specific ideas about social groups, since the attributes ascribed to them are presented as the natural ones, and they reveal the writer’s ideology. (the simplistic reduction of social groups to a single attribute is a reason for discrimination or undesirability). e.g., negative terms: Aussie classrooms reviving aboriginal languages; VS neutral: lost indigenous language revived in Australia. Naming as a way to convey ideology Naming is a form of labelling, but also a way of classifying and handling social relationships. Names assign an identity, role, group membership or quality to people. Naming reveals the cultural background of those who use them both to refer and to address people: there are different naming conventions according to culture and it shows the relationship between people. E.g., nicknames are used among friends and family, tiles preceding the name show deference and respect, derogatory names express dislike. Not following naming conventions may cause insult and offense. In written texts the system of naming can be used to convey and impose point of view on the reported event. E.g. G20 demonstrators march in London (neutral) / G20 protesters clash with London cops (negative) / G20 protests: rioters loot RBS (judgmental). Naming strategies impart ideology and have an effect on the readers’ opinion on the person.