Introduction to Linguistics 2: Winter 2004
John Goldsmith


Office: Classics 307 Office hours Monday 2-3:30, and I'm available a lot of the time otherwise -- just call or email.

ja-goldsmith@uchicago.edu
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/goldsmith
Teaching assistant: Nikki Adams nadams@uchicago.edu

Textbook:

Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction, William O'Grady, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller. I have assigned readings to it in the syllabus below; any text not otherwise identified refers to this book.

But the fact is: over the last few years, the amount of excellent material that is available for free on the Internet has grown enormously, and it's more interesting to browse the Internet than it is to read a single book. So I have gathered a large number of links -- more than you can probably find the time to read -- and integrated them into the syllabus below.

Goal of the course:

We will cover this quarter some of the basic ideas involved in phonetics, phonology, morphology, and computational linguistics, and look at American Sign Language, the language of the Deaf in the United States.

Grading policy:

The grade is based on these things:

In reality, class participation can't help but be relevant, too. Don't believe anyone who says it isn't.

The first report should be about two pages in length, and deal with either phonetics or phonology. You should give a careful description of something relating to phonetics or phonology that you have noticed in your own speech or that of others, and it should relate directly to something we have discussed in class or that is in the reading. Some examples: your unusual pronunication of some sound of English, or that of someone you know; a description of a different dialect of English, or another language that you know; an unusual intonation that you have noticed, and which you wish to describe in linguistic terms; the sounds of a language you are studying; a contrast that you have that some other people don't (or that you don’t that other people do: short a/o distinction, tensing of A as discussed in class); difference between Canadian and American English; Hyde Park English; Afro-American English; Continental French versus Canadian French; some experiments you've done applying Linguistica to a new language.

The final report should be about five pages in length, should be on a different topic than the first report, and may deal with anything covered in the course or reasonably related to it. Most reports will be based on linguistic observations, as in the case of the first report, but this is not a requirement (especially if you pursue a topic in computational linguistics). It is due the last day of class, Tuesday of Week 10.

 

Overview:

Week number Tuesday Thursday
1

January 6: An overview of phonetics, phonology, morphology, and the sound side of language.

 January 8: What is linguistics?
2

January 13: Sounds of English; IPA symbols

 January 15: consonant points and manners of articulation.
3

January 20: Vowels and vowel space

 January 22: Quiz on phonetics
4 January 27: The phoneme: definition of a phonemic analysis.

January 29: The phoneme, part 2.
Examples:
1. stop/spirants in Spanish.
2. Aspiration in Spanish.
3. Affrication and high vowel laxing in Québécois. 4. /ay/-raising in American English.

5 February 3: Complex distribution: the case of the flap in American English February 5
The notion of derivation and the interaction of generalizations.
6 Feb. 10: Prosody Feb 12: Midterm exam
7 February 17 Morphology 1

February 19: Morphology 2. First report due.

8

February 24 Morphology 3

 February 26: ASL1
9 March 3: ASL 2 March 5: Synthesizing intonation in English
10 March 10: Automatic learning of morphology. Final paper due. Change: Class today: Tone in Bantu languages (or at least in one).

What is this course really about:

Here's what I hope you'll take away from this course:

First, you will learn to really listen to the sounds of your own language with a language-independent ear. You'll listen to other languages in the same way, too. And this holds for the vowels, the consonants, and the intonation.

Second, you'll understand what a phoneme is: you'll understand the basic idea, and you'll understand something about how the notion can be defined and applied in a precise fashion.

Third, you'll understand a bit about what a word is in English, and in what respects words can be decomposed into component parts, and in what ways new words arise.

Fourth, you'll learn some basic facts about American Sign Language: how the visual-gestural mode of communication is similar to and different from the oral-aural mode, how the language arose historically, and how it is structured in ways parallel to the structuring of spoken language.

Fifth, you'll have been exposed to some of the ways in which current computational techniques are being used to implement and solve linguistic problems and challenges.

In more detail:

Week number      
1

January 6:An overview of phonetics, phonology, morphology, and the sound side of language.

At our first meeting, I will make appropriate introductory remarks, describe the contents of the syllabus, and give a high-level overview of phonetics and phonology, using a Powerpoint presentation. (Same presentation for browsers without Powerpoint.)

Reading assignment for this week: Chapter 2 Phonetics. Read it all; you'll reread parts later.

January 8: What is linguistics?

Before getting too far into the details of the study of phonetics and phonology, it's worth our while to step back and make a few general remarks about what linguistics is and where it has come from. We will use this class period to do that.

1) Origins of linguistics as a discipline that could serve to preserve sacred and religious texts, to preserve them despite the (inevitable) changes in the language spoken by people.
2) 19th century: Two crucial themes, one philosophical ("history as explanation") and the other political: the rise of nationalism. The creation of the nation-state was tightly linked to the creation of self-consciousness of the speakers of a language (Norway, Italy, Germany, France). This has continued through the 20th century, and for more groups than have formed nation-states. From a scientific-philosophical point of view, the explanation of contemporary languages was best explained by showing the family-like relationship between languages, and uncovering the lawlike regularities that accounted for the evolution of language. Clear connections to the development of Darwin's theory of evolution.
3) 20th century. (a) The development of the notion of the phoneme. (b) The aspiration of linguistics to become a science, and the development of the notion of an algorithm, and the rise of generative grammar.

Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, typologies and universals, historical linguistics, the study of creoles, computational linguistics; theoretical "versus" descriptive linguistics.

Connections to other disciplines: anthropology, philosophy, psychology, computer science, poetics.

What is the relationship between linguistics explanation and psychological or cognitive explanation?

Powerpoint slides.

  
2

January 13: Sounds of English; IPA symbols

Chapter 11. Phonetics: the sounds of language

Acoustics, articulation, and perception. Writing: its invention, its usefulness. Writing is segmental and linear, and uses a small, discrete set of symbols. Writing is also heavily influenced by the history of the language, and serves as a representation of many different dialects. Broad and narrow transcriptions.

The source-filter model of speech production: the vocal folds produce an acoustic signal with energy distributed over a wide range of frequency, but heavily concentrated on a fundamental frequency and its (integral) multiples, also known as its overtones. The fundamental frequency (F0) is the rate at which the vocal folds open and close.
This spectrum is heavily influenced by the articulatory apparatus above it, primarily the mouth. For most of the consonants, the obstruents, addition obstructions in the mouth give rise to further turbulence, a secondary source of acoustic energy. Vowels do not induce further turbulence, but they act as an echo chamber, strengthening some frequencies and weakening others; consonants do this as well, but in a less elegant and refined way. In short, all the activities of the mouth act as a filter applying to the spectrum created by the larynx. The hearer, in turn, must decode the signal into the pieces of information that gave rise to the complex phonetic signal produced by the speaker.

Today's slides

Homework due next Tuesday:
Pages 58ff: Questions 1 - 6.

Reading: For today's class, review pages 15 to 22.

11.2 Phonetic alphabets
Assignment: Learn the IPA symbols needed for a broad description of American English,
11.3: The IPA chart (IPA = International Phonetic Alphabet). Articulators:

Internet:
The IPA's webpage.
George Dillon's Spoken English
Daniel Currie Hall, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, has developed a terrific online, interactive mid-sagittal section. Don't miss it, and don't leave home without one.

But best of all, I'd say:
Peter Ladefoged, one of the premier phoneticians today, has a great webpage with lots of diagrams, symbols, and sound recordings. Spend a lot of time here. Daniel Hall has a nice webpage that provides links to Ladefoged's files too. You will want to be studying these over the next several classes!

Excellent overview of phonetics and phonology by Peter Coxhead

January 15: Consonant points and manners of articulation.
For today's class, review pages 22-32.
Consonantal points of articulation. Assignment:
Manner of articulation:

Superb Powerpoint presentation by Andrew Faulkner (University College London) on the acoustics of consonants.
Another superb Powerpoint presentation on source-filter model, and consonants, this one by Donald Finan (University of Colorado).

French phonology overview.
French sounds
Les sons du français (en français): très bien fait, d'ailleurs

Spanish sounds

Great link from UIowa with both Spanish and English

  
3

January 20: Vowels and vowel space
For today's class, review pages 32 to 38.

Homework due next Tuesday: Page 59: Questions 7-10. Read questions 11-15, but you don't need to answer them.


Web resources:
Symbols for American English Vowel Sounds (George Dillon).
American English vowel sounds (fonetiks.org)
A nice chart by Michael Turner that's missing the vowel of "putt"

Links from today's class: My powerpoint; U Colorado presentation on Source/Filter (powerpoint); Superb powerpoint presentation on speech production more generally from University College London. Labov's superb paper on American dialects, especially American vowels.

Reading this week: Read Chapter 3, pages 63-91 on phonemes and syllables, and pages 91 to 116 as well.

 January 22: Quiz on phonetics This quiz is on the same material as has been in the homework and the class discussions.  
4 January 27: The phoneme: definition of a phonemic analysis.

While there is infinite variety in the speech sounds as acoustic events, a linguistic utterance is not just an acoustic event but also a symbolic event, and it expresses a sequence of symbols selected from a reasonably small inventory of more abstract sound-based units that are called phonemes. A phonemic analysis of a language is a set of phonemes (roughly 15 - 50 in number in a given language) which have both a symbolic and a phonetic side to them. As symbols, they are concatenated to form the expression of morphemes, while from a phonetic point of view, they are expressed acoustically by a range of expressions within a bounded region. The limits of the bounded regions may vary from one dialect to another.

Phonology began with the recognition of this stable interior of languages' sound systems cloaked within a massive range of sound varieties. Some variation is free variation; other variation is set by the context in which the phoneme finds itself. With a knowledge of the principles determining the variation (generally language-particular, not universal), utterances and morphemes can be analyzed as sequences of phonemes.

Principles of a satisfactory phonemic analysis of a language:

1. A phonemic analysis A of a language consists of a finite set of phonemes P; each word can be assigned a phonemic representation, which is a sequence of phonemes, and each sequence of phonemes can be realized in one (or more) way(s) which can be expressed by suitable explicit rules.
2. Distinctness: Any two words are either identical in sound, in which case, their phonemic representation is identical, or distinct, in which case their phonemic representations must be distinct.
3. Predictability of realization: The phonetic realization of a phoneme can be conditioned by its phonological environment (i.e., the other sounds that occur in the utterance), but not by anything else. [Be clear on what "anything else" might be!].
4. Minimality: There must be no alternative phonemic analysis A' with fewer phonemes than A.

Key notions: (1) contrast: two sounds are in contrast if there are two distinct words that differ just by the difference between those sounds (key versus tea, for example), (2) conditioned variation: a /t/ is pronounced in one way before a stressed vowel, and another way elsewhere; and (3) free variation: a certain phoneme can be realized in either of two ways with no possible lexical difference between them. (Almost the "you say potato and I say potah-to" case: but "Tate" and "tot" are distinct words in English.)

Please read Phonemic analysis after this class, and reread pages 63 to 76 of the textbook.

Powerpoint slides on phonemic analysis and flapping (covers several classes).

Another set of slides on phonemes.

Homework due next Tuesday: Page 121, questions 1, 2, 3, 4.

January 29: The phoneme, part 2.
Examples:
1. stop/spirants in Spanish.
2. Aspiration in Porteño Spanish.
3. Affrication and high vowel laxing in Québécois.
4. /ay/-raising in American English.
5. Time permitting: /ae/ tensing in American English

Reading in textbook:

 

  
5

February 3: A case study of complex distribution: the case of the flap in American English.

Web resource: How do Americans flap their /t/s? Read this after this class; you will be responsible for the content.

Homework due next Tuesday: Page 121, questions 5, 11, 13.

February 5: The notion of derivation and the interaction of generalizations: writer/rider

 

Slides on the syllable, from today's class

 
6 Feb. 10: Prosody: pitch, duration, and loudness. English and tone languages and accent. Pitch accent. Tone in KiHunde (Bantu, Congo)

Powerpoint presentation on English and tone languages.

Reading assignment: For today's class, review pages 38 to 43, and review pages 112-118.

Reading assignment for next week: pages 131 - 182, Chapter 4.

Feb 12: Midterm

 

  
7

February 17 Morphology 1

What is a word? What is a morpheme? Can words be broken up (down) into component pieces? Do the pieces have meanings? Allomorphy. Base and affix; prefix, suffix, infix.

Here are some excellent readings to be found on the Internet. Please look into them, and read around in them. Internet readings:

What is a word? by Larry Trask

Inflectional vs. derivational morphology:
Morphology CSU San Bernardino
Presentations by:
Amy Weinberg
Mark Johnson
Gene Buckley (Penn)
Mark Liberman, Ellen Prince (Penn) (part 2)
Computational side:
Dr. Peter Coxhead

Homework for next Tuesday: p. 173, questions 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, 11,18.

February 19: Morphology 2.

Inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, compounding, cliticization, reduplication.

 

  
8

February 24: Morphology 3.

February 26

American Sign Language 1
Powerpoint presentation on ASL.
Please look at: Sign language links.-- especially check out the ASL literature web site.
The range of sign languages around the world; history of the spread of sign languages, and their independence from the spoken languages of their regions. Arbitrariness and iconicity in the ASL lexicon.
Their use of signing space in the lexicon and in expression grammatical relations. Handshape, location, orientation. Battison typology of sign types. Paths.

Web resource:
Linguistics Society of America page on ASL.

  
9 March 3:ASL 2
Some generalizations about the ASL lexicon (Battison's generalizations). More on word order. Classifiers.

March 5: Intonation in English, and the computation of natural sounding synthetic speech

  
10

March 10: Automatic learning of morphology. The design of software to automatically learn the morphology of a language. See Linguistica's website.

Final paper due.

 March 12: Tone in Bantu: a closer look at a phonological analysis. Slides.