9th edition
An
Introduction
to Language
Victoria Fromkin
Robert Rodman
Nina Hyams
Classification of American English Vowels
Part of the Tongue Involved
Tongue
Height
FRONT
HIGH
i beet
CENTRAL
I bit
BACK
boot
u
put
Á
ROUNDED
MID
e bait
” bet
E
o
bore
O
Rosa
Ø butt
LOW
boat
œ bat
bomb a
A Phonetic Alphabet for English Pronunciation
Consonants
Vowels
p
pill
t
till
k
kill
i
beet
ɪ
bit
b
bill
d
dill
g
gill
e
bait
ɛ
bet
m
mill
n
nil
ŋ
ring
u
boot
ʊ
foot
f
feel
s
seal
h
heal
o
boat
ɔ
bore
v
veal
z
zeal
l
leaf
æ
bat
a
pot/bar
θ
thigh
tʃ
chill
r
reef
ʌ
butt
ə
sofa
ð
thy
dʒ
gin
j
you
aɪ
bite
aʊ
bout
ʃ
shill
ʍ
which
w
witch
ɔɪ
boy
ʒ
measure
An Introduction
9e
to Language
An Introduction
9e
to Language
V I C T O R IA F R O M K I N
Late, University of California, Los Angeles
RO B E R T RO D M A N
North Carolina State University, Raleigh
N I N A H YA M S
University of California, Los Angeles
Australia • Brazil • Japan • Korea • Mexico • Singapore • Spain • United Kingdom • United States
An Introduction to Language,
Ninth Edition
Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman,
Nina Hyams
Senior Publisher: Lyn Uhl
Publisher: Michael Rosenberg
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© 2011, 2007, 2003 Wadsworth, Cengage Learning
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In memory of Irene Moss Hyams
Contents
Preface xiii
About the Authors xix
PA RT 1
The Nature of Human Language
INTRODUCTION
Brain and Language 3
The Human Brain 4
The Localization of Language
in the Brain 5
Aphasia 6
Brain Imaging Technology 12
Brain Plasticity and Lateralization
in Early Life 14
Split Brains 15
Other Experimental Evidence
of Brain Organization 16
The Autonomy of Language 18
Other Dissociations of Language
and Cognition 19
Laura 20
Christopher 20
Genetic Basis of Language 21
Language and Brain Development 22
The Critical Period 22
A Critical Period for Bird Song 25
The Development of Language
in the Species 26
Summary 28
References for Further Reading 29
Exercises 30
PA RT 2
Grammatical Aspects of Language
CHAPTER 1
Morphology: The Words
of Language 36
Dictionaries
38
Content Words and Function Words 38
Morphemes: The Minimal Units of Meaning 40
Bound and Free Morphemes 43
Prefixes and Suffixes 43
Infixes 45
Circumfixes 45
Roots and Stems 46
Bound Roots 47
Rules of Word Formation 47
Derivational Morphology 48
Inflectional Morphology 50
The Hierarchical Structure of Words 53
Rule Productivity 56
Exceptions and Suppletions 58
Lexical Gaps 59
Other Morphological Processes 60
Back-Formations 60
Compounds 60
“Pullet Surprises” 63
Sign Language Morphology
63
vii
viii
CONTENTS
Semantic Rule II 145
When Compositionality Goes Awry 146
Anomaly 147
Metaphor 149
Idioms 150
Morphological Analysis: Identifying
Morphemes 64
Summary 67
References for Further Reading 68
Exercises 68
Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings) 152
Theories of Word Meaning 153
Reference 154
Sense 155
Lexical Relations 156
Semantic Features 159
CHAPTER 2
Syntax: The Sentence
Patterns of Language 77
What the Syntax Rules Do 78
What Grammaticality Is Not Based On
Sentence Structure 83
Constituents and Constituency Tests
Syntactic Categories 86
Phrase Structure Trees and Rules
Heads and Complements
Selection 103
Sentence Relatedness 115
Transformational Rules
89
105
109
115
The Structural Dependency
of Rules 117
Further Syntactic Dependencies 120
UG Principles and Parameters
124
Evidence for Semantic Features 160
Semantic Features and Grammar 160
Argument Structure
84
102
What Heads the Sentence
Structural Ambiguities
More Structures 111
82
163
Thematic Roles 164
Pragmatics 167
Pronouns 167
Pronouns and Syntax 168
Pronouns and Discourse 169
Pronouns and Situational Context
Deixis 170
More on Situational Context
Maxims of Conversation
Implicatures 174
Speech Acts 175
172
172
Summary 176
References for Further Reading 178
Exercises 178
Sign Language Syntax 127
Summary 128
References for Further Reading 129
Exercises 130
CHAPTER 3
The Meaning
of Language 139
What Speakers Know about Sentence
Meaning 140
Truth 140
Entailment and Related Notions 141
Ambiguity 142
Compositional Semantics 144
Semantic Rules 144
Semantic Rule I 145
CHAPTER 4
Phonetics: The Sounds
of Language 189
Sound Segments 190
Identity of Speech Sounds 191
The Phonetic Alphabet 192
Articulatory Phonetics
Consonants 195
195
Place of Articulation 195
Manner of Articulation 197
Phonetic Symbols for American
English Consonants 204
Vowels 206
Tongue Position 206
Lip Rounding 208
169
Contents
Diphthongs 208
Nasalization of Vowels 209
Tense and Lax Vowels 209
Different (Tongue) Strokes
for Different Folks 210
Major Phonetic Classes
210
Noncontinuants and Continuants
Obstruents and Sonorants 210
Consonantal 211
Syllabic Sounds 211
210
Prosodic Features 212
Tone and Intonation 213
Phonetic Symbols and Spelling
Correspondences 215
The “Phonetics” of Signed Languages 217
Summary 219
References for Further Reading 220
Exercises 221
CHAPTER 5
Phonology: The Sound
Patterns of Language 226
The Pronunciation of Morphemes 227
The Pronunciation of Plurals 227
Additional Examples of Allomorphs
Phonemes: The Phonological Units of
Language 232
Vowel Nasalization in English as
an Illustration of Allophones 232
Allophones of /t/ 234
Complementary Distribution 235
230
ix
Distinctive Features of Phonemes 238
Feature Values 238
Nondistinctive Features 239
Phonemic Patterns May Vary across
Languages 241
ASL Phonology 242
Natural Classes of Speech Sounds 242
Feature Specifications for American
English Consonants and Vowels 243
The Rules of Phonology 244
Assimilation Rules 244
Dissimilation Rules 248
Feature-Changing Rules 249
Segment Insertion and Deletion Rules 250
Movement (Metathesis) Rules 252
From One to Many and from Many
to One 253
The Function of Phonological Rules 255
Slips of the Tongue: Evidence for
Phonological Rules 255
Prosodic Phonology 256
Syllable Structure 256
Word Stress 257
Sentence and Phrase Stress 258
Intonation 259
Sequential Constraints of Phonemes
Lexical Gaps 262
Why Do Phonological Rules Exist?
260
262
Phonological Analysis 264
Summary 268
References for Further Reading 269
Exercises 270
PA RT 3
The Biology and Psychology of Language
CHAPTER 6
What Is Language? 284
Linguistic Knowledge 284
Knowledge of the Sound System
Knowledge of Words 286
Arbitrary Relation of Form
and Meaning 286
285
The Creativity of Linguistic
Knowledge 289
Knowledge of Sentences and
Nonsentences 291
Linguistic Knowledge and Performance
What Is Grammar? 294
Descriptive Grammars
294
292
x
CONTENTS
The Acquisition of Signed
Languages 355
Prescriptive Grammars 295
Teaching Grammars 297
Language Universals 298
The Development of Grammar 299
Sign Languages: Evidence for the Innateness
of Language 300
American Sign Language 301
Animal “Languages” 302
“Talking” Parrots 303
The Birds and the Bees 304
Can Chimps Learn Human Language? 306
In the Beginning: The Origin of Language 308
Divine Gift 309
The First Language 309
Human Invention or the Cries
of Nature? 310
Language and Thought
310
What We Know about Human Language
315
Summary 317
References for Further Reading 318
Exercises 319
CHAPTER 7
Language Acquisition 324
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition 325
Do Children Learn through Imitation? 325
Do Children Learn through Correction
and Reinforcement? 326
Do Children Learn Language through
Analogy? 327
Do Children Learn through Structured
Input? 329
Children Construct Grammars 330
The Innateness Hypothesis 330
Stages in Language Acquisition 332
The Perception and Production
of Speech Sounds 333
Babbling 334
First Words 335
Segmenting the Speech Stream 336
The Development of Grammar 339
Setting Parameters 354
Knowing More Than One Language 357
Childhood Bilingualism 357
Theories of Bilingual
Development 358
Two Monolinguals in One Head 360
The Role of Input 360
Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism 361
Second Language Acquisition
361
Is L2 Acquisition the Same as L1
Acquisition? 361
Native Language Influence in L2
Acquisition 363
The Creative Component of L2
Acquisition 364
Is There a Critical Period for L2
Acquisition? 365
Summary 366
References for Further Reading 368
Exercises 369
CHAPTER 8
Language Processing:
Humans and
Computers 375
The Human Mind at Work:
Human Language Processing 375
Comprehension 377
The Speech Signal 378
Speech Perception and
Comprehension 379
Bottom-up and Top-down
Models 381
Lexical Access and Word
Recognition 383
Syntactic Processing 384
Speech Production 387
Planning Units 387
Lexical Selection 389
Application and Misapplication
of Rules 389
Nonlinguistic Influences 390
Computer Processing of Human Language 391
Computers That Talk and Listen 391
Contents
Computational Phonetics and
Phonology 391
Computational Morphology 396
Computational Syntax 397
Computational Semantics 402
Computational Pragmatics 404
Computational Sign Language 405
Applications of Computational
Linguistics 406
Computer Models of Grammar 406
Frequency Analysis, Concordances,
and Collocations 407
Computational Lexicography 409
Information Retrieval and
Summarization 410
Spell Checkers 411
Machine Translation 412
Computational Forensic
Linguistics 414
Summary 418
References for Further Reading 420
Exercises 421
PA RT 4
Language and Society
CHAPTER 9
Jargon and Argot 470
Taboo or Not Taboo? 471
Euphemisms 473
Racial and National Epithets
Language and Sexism 474
Language in Society 430
Dialects 430
Regional Dialects 432
Phonological Differences 434
Lexical Differences 435
Dialect Atlases 436
Syntactic Differences 436
Social Dialects
Marked and Unmarked Forms
Summary 477
References for Further Reading 479
Exercises 480
The “Standard” 439
African American English 442
Latino (Hispanic) English 446
Genderlects 448
Sociolinguistic Analysis 451
CHAPTER 10
Language Change:
The Syllables of Time 488
Languages in Contact 452
Lingua Francas 453
Contact Languages: Pidgins
and Creoles 454
Creoles and Creolization 457
Bilingualism 460
Codeswitching 461
Language in Use 469
Styles 469
Slang 470
475
Secret Languages and Language
Games 476
439
Language and Education 463
Second-Language Teaching Methods
Teaching Reading 465
Bilingual Education 467
“Ebonics” 468
474
The Regularity of Sound Change 489
Sound Correspondences 490
Ancestral Protolanguages 490
Phonological Change 491
Phonological Rules 492
The Great Vowel Shift 493
463
Morphological Change
Syntactic Change
494
496
Lexical Change 500
Change in Category 500
Addition of New Words 500
Word Coinage 501
xi
xii
CONTENTS
Words from Names 502
Blends 503
Reduced Words 504
Borrowings or Loan Words
CHAPTER 11
Writing: The ABCs
of Language 540
504
The History of Writing 541
Pictograms and Ideograms 541
Cuneiform Writing 543
The Rebus Principle 545
From Hieroglyphics to the Alphabet
Loss of Words 507
Semantic Change 508
Broadening 508
Narrowing 509
Meaning Shifts 509
Modern Writing Systems 547
Word Writing 548
Syllabic Writing 549
Consonantal Alphabet Writing
Alphabetic Writing 551
Reconstructing “Dead” Languages 509
The Nineteenth-Century
Comparativists 510
Cognates 511
Comparative Reconstruction 514
Historical Evidence 516
Extinct and Endangered Languages 518
The Genetic Classification of Languages
Languages of the World 523
Types of Languages
525
520
Writing and Speech 553
Spelling 556
Spelling Pronunciations
560
Summary 561
References for Further Reading 562
Exercises 563
Why Do Languages Change? 528
Glossary
Summary 530
References for Further Reading 531
Exercises 532
Index 601
569
551
546
Preface
Well, this bit which I am writing, called Introduction, is really the er-h’r’m of the book,
and I have put it in, partly so as not to take you by surprise, and partly because I can’t do
without it now. There are some very clever writers who say that it is quite easy not to have
an er-h’r’m, but I don’t agree with them. I think it is much easier not to have all the rest of
the book.
A. A. MILNE , Now We Are Six, 1927
The last thing we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.
BLAISE PASCAL (1623–1662)
The ninth edition of An Introduction to Language continues in the spirit of
our friend, colleague, mentor, and coauthor, Victoria Fromkin. Vicki loved language, and she loved to tell people about it. She found linguistics fun and fascinating, and she wanted every student and every teacher to think so, too. Though
this edition has been completely rewritten for improved clarity and currency, we
have nevertheless preserved Vicki’s lighthearted, personal approach to a complex topic, including witty quotations from noted authors (A. A. Milne was one
of Vicki’s favorites). We hope we have kept the spirit of Vicki’s love for teaching
about language alive in the pages of this book.
The first eight editions of An Introduction to Language succeeded, with the
help of dedicated teachers, in introducing the nature of human language to tens
of thousands of students. This is a book that students enjoy and understand
and that professors find effective and thorough. Not only have majors in linguistics benefited from the book’s easy-to-read yet comprehensive presentation,
majors in fields as diverse as teaching English as a second language, foreign language studies, general education, psychology, sociology, and anthropology have
enjoyed learning about language from this book.
Highlights of This Edition
This edition includes new developments in linguistics and related fields that will
strengthen its appeal to a wider audience. Much of this information will enable
students to gain insight and understanding about linguistic issues and debates
appearing in the national media and will help professors and students stay current with important linguistic research. We hope that it may also dispel certain
common misconceptions that people have about language and language use.
Many more exercises (240) are available in this edition than ever before,
allowing students to test their comprehension of the material in the text. Many
of the exercises are multipart, amounting to more than 300 opportunities for
“homework” so that instructors can gauge their student’s progress. Some exercises are marked as “challenge” questions if they go beyond the scope of what is
xiii
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PREFACE
ordinarily expected in a first course in language study. An answer key is available to instructors to assist them in areas outside of their expertise.
The Introduction, “Brain and Language,” retains its forward placement in
the book because we believe that one can learn about the brain through language, and about the nature of the human being through the brain. This chapter
may be read and appreciated without technical knowledge of linguistics. When
the centrality of language to human nature is appreciated, students will be
motivated to learn more about human language, and about linguistics, because
they will be learning more about themselves. As in the previous edition, highly
detailed illustrations of MRI and PET scans of the brain are included, and this
chapter highlights some of the new results and tremendous progress in the study
of neurolinguistics over the past few years. The arguments for the autonomy of
language in the human brain are carefully crafted so that the student sees how
experimental evidence is applied to support scientific theories.
Chapters 1 and 2, on morphology and syntax, have been heavily rewritten
for increased clarity, while weaving in new results that reflect current thinking
on how words and sentences are structured and understood. In particular, the
chapter on syntax continues to reflect the current views on binary branching,
heads and complements, selection, and X-bar phrase structure. Non-English
examples abound in these two chapters and throughout the entire book. The
intention is to enhance the student’s understanding of the differences among
languages as well as the universal aspects of grammar. Nevertheless, the introductory spirit of these chapters is not sacrificed, and students gain a deep understanding of word and phrase structure with a minimum of formalisms and a
maximum of insightful examples and explanations, supplemented as always by
quotes, poetry, and humor.
Chapter 3, on semantics or meaning, has been more highly structuralized so
that the challenging topics of this complex subject can be digested in smaller
pieces. Still based on the theme of “What do you know about meaning when you
know a language?”, the chapter first introduces students to truth-conditional
semantics and the principle of compositionality. Following that are discussions
of what happens when compositionality fails, as with idioms, metaphors, and
anomalous sentences. Lexical semantics takes up various approaches to word
meaning, including the concepts of reference and sense, semantic features, argument structure, and thematic roles. Finally, the chapter concludes with pragmatic considerations, including the distinction between linguistic and situational
context in discourse, deixis, maxims of conversation, implicatures, and speech
acts, all newly rewritten for currency and clarity.
Chapter 4, on phonetics, retains its former organization with one significant
change: We have totally embraced IPA (International Phonetics Association)
notation for English in keeping with current tendencies, with the sole exception
of using /r/ in place of the technically correct /ɹ/. We continue to mention alternative notations that students may encounter in other publications.
Chapter 5, on phonology, has been streamlined by relegating several complex
examples (e.g., metathesis in Hebrew) to the exercises, where instructors can opt
to include them if it is thought that students can handle such advanced material. The chapter continues to be presented with a greater emphasis on insights
through linguistic data accompanied by small amounts of well-explicated for-
Preface
malisms, so that the student can appreciate the need for formal theories without
experiencing the burdensome details.
Chapter 6 is a concise introduction to the general study of language. It now
contains many topics of special interest to students, including “Language and
Thought,” which takes up the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; discussions of signed
languages; a consideration of animal “languages”; and a treatment of language
origins.
The chapters comprising Part 3, “The Psychology of Language,” have been
both rewritten and restructured for clarity. Chapter 7, “Language Acquisition,”
is still rich in data from both English and other languages, and has been updated
with newer examples from the ever expanding research in this vital topic. The
arguments for innateness and Universal Grammar that language acquisition provides are exploited to show the student how scientific theories of great import
are discovered and supported through observation, experiment, and reason. As
in most chapters, American Sign Language (ASL) is discussed, and its important
role in understanding the biological foundations of language is emphasized.
In chapter 8, the section on psycholinguistics has been updated to conform
to recent discoveries. The section on computational linguistics has been substantially reorganized into two subsections: technicalities and applications. In the
applications section is an entirely new presentation of forensic computational
linguistics—the use of computers in solving crimes that involve language, and,
similarly, resolving judicial matters such as trademark disputes.
Part 4 is concerned with language in society, including sociolinguistics (chapter 9) and historical linguistics (chapter 10). Readers of previous editions will
scarcely recognize the much revised and rewritten chapter 9. The section “Languages in Contact” has been thoroughly researched and brought up to date,
including insightful material on pidgins and creoles, their origins, interrelationship, and subtypes. An entirely new section, “Language and Education,” discusses some of the sociolinguistic issues facing the classroom teacher in our multicultural school systems. No sections have been omitted, but many have been
streamlined and rewritten for clarity, such as the section on “Language in Use.”
Chapter 10, on language change, has undergone a few changes. The section
“Extinct and Endangered Languages” has been completely rewritten and brought
up to date to reflect the intense interest in this critical subject. The same is true
of the section “Types of Languages,” which now reflects the latest research.
Chapter 11, on writing systems, is unchanged from the previous edition with
the exception of a mild rewriting to further improve clarity, and the movement
of the section on reading to chapter 9.
Terms that appear bold in the text are defined in the revised glossary at the
end of the book. The glossary has been expanded and improved so that the
ninth edition provides students with a linguistic lexicon of nearly 700 terms,
making the book a worthy reference volume.
The order of presentation of chapters 1 through 5 was once thought to be
nontraditional. Our experience, backed by previous editions of the book and the
recommendations of colleagues throughout the world, has convinced us that it is
easier for the novice to approach the structural aspects of language by first looking at morphology (the structure of the most familiar linguistic unit, the word).
This is followed by syntax (the structure of sentences), which is also familiar
xv
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PREFACE
to many students, as are numerous semantic concepts. We then proceed to the
more novel (to students) phonetics and phonology, which students often find
daunting. However, the book is written so that individual instructors can present material in the traditional order of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics (chapters 4, 5, 1, 2, and 3) without confusion, if they wish.
As in previous editions, the primary concern has been with basic ideas rather
than detailed expositions. This book assumes no previous knowledge on the
part of the reader. An updated list of references at the end of each chapter is
included to accommodate any reader who wishes to pursue a subject in more
depth. Each chapter concludes with a summary and exercises to enhance the
student’s interest in and comprehension of the textual material.
Acknowledgments
Our endeavor to maintain the currency of linguistic concepts in times of rapid
progress has been invaluably enhanced by the following colleagues, to whom we
owe an enormous debt of gratitude:
Susan Curtiss
Jeff MacSwan
John Olsson
Fernanda Pratas
Otto Santa Ana
Andrew Simpson
University of California,
Los Angeles
Arizona State University
Forensic Linguistic
Institute, Wales, U.K.
Universidade Nova
de Lisboa
University of California,
Los Angeles
University of Southern
California
brain and language
bilingual education,
bilingual
communities
forensic linguistics
pidgin/creoles
Chicano English
language and society
We would also like to extend our appreciation to the following individuals
for their help and guidance:
Deborah Grant
Edward Keenan
Giuseppe Longobardi
Pamela Munro
Reiko Okabe
Megha Sundara
Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
Independent consultant
University of California,
Los Angeles
Università di Venezia
University of California,
Los Angeles
Nihon University, Tokyo
University of California,
Los Angeles
University of Southern
California
general feedback
historical linguistics
historical linguistics
endangered
languages
Japanese and gender
early speech
perception
language contact
Preface
Brook Danielle Lillehaugen undertook the daunting task of writing the
Answer Key to the ninth edition. Her thoroughness, accuracy, and insightfulness in construing solutions to problems and discussions of issues will be deeply
appreciated by all who avail themselves of this useful document.
We also express deep appreciation for the incisive comments of eight reviewers of the eighth edition, known to us as R1–R8, whose frank assessment of the
work, both critical and laudatory, heavily influenced this new edition:
Lynn A. Burley
Fred Field
Jackson Gandour
Virginia Lewis
Tom Nash
Nancy Stenson
Mel Storm
Robert Trammell
University of Central Arkansas
California State University, Northridge
Purdue University, West Lafayette
Northern State University
Southern Oregon University
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Emporia State University
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
We continue to be deeply grateful to the individuals who have sent us suggestions, corrections, criticisms, cartoons, language data, and exercises over
the course of many editions. Their influence is still strongly felt in this ninth
edition. The list is long and reflects the global, communal collaboration that a
book about language—the most global of topics—merits. To each of you, our
heartfelt thanks and appreciation. Know that in this ninth edition lives your
contribution:1
Adam Albright, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rebecca Barghorn,
University of Oldenburg; Seyed Reza Basiroo, Islamic Azad University; Karol
Boguszewski, Poland; Melanie Borchers, Universität Duisburg-Essen; Donna
Brinton, Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles; Daniel Bruhn, University of California, Berkeley; Ivano Caponigro, University of California, San
Diego; Ralph S. Carlson, Azusa Pacific University; Robert Channon, Purdue
University; Judy Cheatham, Greensboro College; Leonie Cornips, Meertens
Institute; Antonio Damásio, University of Southern California; Hanna Damásio, University of Southern California; Julie Damron, Brigham Young University; Rosalia Dutra, University of North Texas; Christina Esposito, Macalester
College; Susan Fiksdal, Evergreen State College; Beverly Olson Flanigan and her
teaching assistants, Ohio University; Jule Gomez de Garcia, California State University, San Marcos; Loretta Gray, Central Washington University; Xiangdong
Gu, Chongqing University; Helena Halmari, Sam Houston State University;
Sharon Hargus, University of Washington; Benjamin H. Hary, Emory University; Tometro Hopkins, Florida International University; Eric Hyman, University of North Carolina, Fayetteville; Dawn Ellen Jacobs, California Baptist University; Seyed Yasser Jebraily, University of Tehran; Kyle Johnson, University
of Massachusetts, Amherst; Paul Justice, San Diego State University; Simin
Karimi, University of Arizona; Robert D. King, University of Texas; Sharon
M. Klein, California State University, Northridge; Nathan Klinedinst, Institut
1Some
affiliations may have changed or are unknown to us at this time.
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PREFACE
Jean Nicod/CNRS, Paris; Otto Krauss, Jr., late, unaffiliated; Elisabeth Kuhn,
Virginia Commonwealth University; Peter Ladefoged, Late, University of California, Los Angeles; Mary Ann Larsen-Pusey, Fresno Pacific University; Rabbi
Robert Layman, Philadelphia; Byungmin Lee, Korea; Virginia “Ginny” Lewis,
Northern State University; David Lightfoot, Georgetown University; Ingvar
Lofstedt, University of California, Los Angeles; Harriet Luria, Hunter College,
City University of New York; Tracey McHenry, Eastern Washington University;
Carol Neidle, Boston University; Don Nilsen, Arizona State University; Anjali
Pandey, Salisbury University; Barbara Hall Partee, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst; Vincent D. Puma, Flagler College; Ian Roberts, Cambridge University;
Tugba Rona, Istanbul International Community School; Natalie Schilling-Estes,
Georgetown University; Philippe Schlenker, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris and New
York University; Carson Schütze, University of California, Los Angeles; Bruce
Sherwood, North Carolina State University; Koh Shimizu, Beijing; Dwan L.
Shipley, Washington University; Muffy Siegel, Temple University; Neil Smith,
University College London; Donca Steriade, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Nawaf Sulami, University of Northern Iowa; Dalys Vargas, College of
Notre Dame; Willis Warren, Saint Edwards University; Donald K. Watkins,
University of Kansas; Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University.
Please forgive us if we have inadvertently omitted any names, and if we have
spelled every name correctly, then we shall believe in miracles.
Finally, we wish to thank the editorial and production team at Cengage
Learning. They have been superb and supportive in every way: Michael Rosenberg, publisher; Joan M. Flaherty, development editor; Michael Lepera, content
project manager; Jennifer Bonnar, project manager, Lachina Publishing Services;
Christy Goldfinch, copy editor; Diane Miller, proofreader; Bob Kauser, permissions editor; Joan Shapiro, indexer; and Brian Salisbury, text designer.
Last but certainly not least, we acknowledge our debt to those we love and
who love us and who inspire our work when nothing else will: Nina’s son,
Michael; Robert’s wife, Helen; our parents; and our dearly beloved and still
deeply missed colleagues, Vicki Fromkin and Peter Ladefoged.
The responsibility for errors in fact or judgment is, of course, ours alone. We
continue to be indebted to the instructors who have used the earlier editions and
to their students, without whom there would be no ninth edition.
Robert Rodman
Nina Hyams
About the Authors
VICTORIA FROMKIN received her bachelor’s degree in economics from the
University of California, Berkeley, in 1944 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics
from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1963 and 1965, respectively.
She was a member of the faculty of the UCLA Department of Linguistics from
1966 until her death in 2000, and served as its chair from 1972 to 1976. From
1979 to 1989 she served as the UCLA Graduate Dean and Vice Chancellor of
Graduate Programs. She was a visiting professor at the Universities of Stockholm, Cambridge, and Oxford. Professor Fromkin served as president of the
Linguistics Society of America in 1985, president of the Association of Graduate
Schools in 1988, and chair of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Aphasia. She received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the Professional
Achievement Award, and served as the U.S. Delegate and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Permanent Committee of Linguistics (CIPL).
She was an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New York Academy
of Science, the American Psychological Society, and the Acoustical Society of
America, and in 1996 was elected to membership in the National Academy of
Sciences. She published more than one hundred books, monographs, and papers
on topics concerned with phonetics, phonology, tone languages, African languages, speech errors, processing models, aphasia, and the brain/mind/language
interface—all research areas in which she worked. Professor Fromkin passed
away on January 19, 2000, at the age of 76.
ROBERT RODMAN received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the
University of California, Los Angeles, in 1961, a master’s degree in mathematics in 1965, a master’s degree in linguistics in 1971, and his Ph.D. in linguistics
in 1973. He has been on the faculties of the University of California at Santa
Cruz, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kyoto Industrial College
in Japan, and North Carolina State University, where he is currently a professor
of computer science. His research areas are forensic linguistics and computer
speech processing. Robert resides in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife,
Helen, Blue the Labrador, and Gracie, a rescued greyhound.
NINA HYAMS received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University in 1973 and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in linguistics from the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York in 1981 and 1983, respectively. She
joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1983, where she
is currently a professor of linguistics. Her main areas of research are childhood
language development and syntax. She is author of the book Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters (D. Reidel Publishers, 1986), a milestone in
language acquisition research. She has also published numerous articles on the
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
development of syntax, morphology, and semantics in children. She has been a
visiting scholar at the University of Utrecht and the University of Leiden in the
Netherlands and has given numerous lectures throughout Europe and Japan.
Nina lives in Los Angeles with her pal Spot, a rescued border collie mutt.
1
The Nature of Human
Language
Reflecting on Noam Chomsky’s ideas on the innateness of the fundamentals
of grammar in the human mind, I saw that any innate features of the language
capacity must be a set of biological structures, selected in the course of the
evolution of the human brain.
S . E . L U R I A , A Slot Machine, a Broken Test Tube, an Autobiography, 1984
2
PART 1 The Nature of Human Language
The nervous systems of all animals have a number of basic functions in common,
most notably the control of movement and the analysis of sensation. What
distinguishes the human brain is the variety of more specialized activities it is
capable of learning. The preeminent example is language.
N O R M A N G E S C H W I N D , 1979
Linguistics shares with other sciences a concern to be objective, systematic,
consistent, and explicit in its account of language. Like other sciences, it aims to
collect data, test hypotheses, devise models, and construct theories. Its subject
matter, however, is unique: at one extreme it overlaps with such “hard” sciences
as physics and anatomy; at the other, it involves such traditional “arts” subjects as
philosophy and literary criticism. The field of linguistics includes both science and
the humanities, and offers a breadth of coverage that, for many aspiring students
of the subject, is the primary source of its appeal.
D AV I D C R Y S TA L , The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 1987
Introduction
Brain and Language
The functional asymmetry of the human brain is unequivocal, and so is its anatomical
asymmetry. The structural differences between the left and the right hemispheres are
visible not only under the microscope but to the naked eye. The most striking asymmetries
occur in language-related cortices. It is tempting to assume that such anatomical
differences are an index of the neurobiological underpinnings of language.
ANTONIO AND HANNA DAMÁSIO, University of Southern California, Brain and
Creativity Institute and Department of Neuroscience
Attempts to understand the complexities of human cognitive abilities and especially the acquisition and use of language are as old and as continuous as history
itself. What is the nature of the brain? What is the nature of human language?
And what is the relationship between the two? Philosophers and scientists have
grappled with these questions and others over the centuries. The idea that the
brain is the source of human language and cognition goes back more than two
thousand years. The philosophers of ancient Greece speculated about the brain/
mind relationship, but neither Plato nor Aristotle recognized the brain’s crucial
function in cognition or language. However, others of the same period showed
great insight, as illustrated in the following quote from the Hippocratic Treatises
on the Sacred Disease, written c. 377 b.c.e.:
[The brain is] the messenger of the understanding [and the organ whereby] in
an especial manner we acquire wisdom and knowledge.
The study of language has been crucial to understanding the brain/mind
relationship. Conversely, research on the brain in humans and other primates
is helping to answer questions concerning the neurological basis for language.
The study of the biological and neural foundations of language is called neurolinguistics. Neurolinguistic research is often based on data from atypical or
impaired language and uses such data to understand properties of human language in general.
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
The Human Brain
“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”
A. A. MILNE, The House at Pooh Corner, 1928
The brain is the most complex organ of the body. It lies under the skull and
consists of approximately 100 billion nerve cells (neurons) and billions of fibers
that interconnect them. The surface of the brain is the cortex, often called “gray
matter,” consisting of billions of neurons. The cortex is the decision-making
organ of the body. It receives messages from all of the sensory organs, initiates
all voluntary and involuntary actions, and is the storehouse of our memories.
Somewhere in this gray matter resides the grammar that represents our knowledge of language.
The brain is composed of cerebral hemispheres, one on the right and one on
the left, joined by the corpus callosum, a network of more than 200 million
fibers (see Figure I.1). The corpus callosum allows the two hemispheres of the
brain to communicate with each other. Without this system of connections, the
Front
Left
Hemisphere
Corpus Callosum
Right
Hemisphere
Cortex
White
Matter
Back
FIGURE I.1 | Three-dimensional reconstruction of the normal living human brain. The
images were obtained from magnetic resonance data using the Brainvox technique. Left
panel = view from top. Right panel = view from the front following virtual coronal section
at the level of the dashed line.
Courtesy of Hanna Damásio.
The Human Brain
two hemispheres would operate independently. In general, the left hemisphere
controls the right side of the body, and the right hemisphere controls the left
side. If you point with your right hand, the left hemisphere is responsible for
your action. Similarly, sensory information from the right side of the body (e.g.,
right ear, right hand, right visual field) is received by the left hemisphere of the
brain, and sensory input to the left side of the body is received by the right hemisphere. This is referred to as contralateral brain function.
The Localization of Language in the Brain
“Peanuts” copyright . 1984 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
An issue of central concern has been to determine which parts of the brain are
responsible for human linguistic abilities. In the early nineteenth century, Franz
Joseph Gall proposed the theory of localization, which is the idea that different
human cognitive abilities and behaviors are localized in specific parts of the
brain. In light of our current knowledge about the brain, some of Gall’s particular views are amusing. For example, he proposed that language is located in the
frontal lobes of the brain because as a young man he had noticed that the most
articulate and intelligent of his fellow students had protruding eyes, which he
believed reflected overdeveloped brain material. He also put forth a pseudoscientific theory called “organology” that later came to be known as phrenology,
which is the practice of determining personality traits, intellectual capacities,
and other matters by examining the “bumps” on the skull. A disciple of Gall’s,
Johann Spurzheim, introduced phrenology to America, constructing elaborate
maps and skull models such as the one shown in Figure I.2, in which language is
located directly under the eye.
Gall was a pioneer and a courageous scientist in arguing against the prevailing
view that the brain was an unstructured organ. Although phrenology has long
been discarded as a scientific theory, Gall’s view that the brain is not a uniform
mass, and that linguistic and other cognitive capacities are functions of localized
5
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
FIGURE I.2 | Phrenology skull model.
brain areas, has been upheld by scientific investigation of brain disorders, and,
over the past two decades, by numerous studies using sophisticated technologies.
Aphasia
For Better Or For Worse © 2007 Lynn Johnston Prod. Reprinted by permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All rights
reserved.
The study of aphasia has been an important area of research in understanding the
relationship between brain and language. Aphasia is the neurological term for any
language disorder that results from brain damage caused by disease or trauma.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, significant scientific advances were
The Human Brain
FIGURE I.3 | Lateral (external) view of the left hemisphere of the human brain,
showing the position of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas—two key areas of the cortex
related to language processing.
made in localizing language in the brain based on the study of people with aphasia. In the 1860s the French surgeon Paul Broca proposed that language is localized to the left hemisphere of the brain, and more specifically to the front part
of the left hemisphere (now called Broca’s area). At a scientific meeting in Paris,
he claimed that we speak with the left hemisphere. Broca’s finding was based on
a study of his patients who suffered language deficits after brain injury to the
left frontal lobe. A decade later Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist, described
another variety of aphasia that occurred in patients with lesions in areas of the
left hemisphere temporal lobe, now known as Wernicke’s area. Language, then,
is lateralized to the left hemisphere, and the left hemisphere appears to be the
language hemisphere from infancy on. Lateralization is the term used to refer to
the localization of function to one hemisphere of the brain. Figure I.3 is a view of
the left side of the brain that shows Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas.
The Linguistic Characterization of Aphasic Syndromes
Most aphasics do not show total language loss. Rather, different aspects of language are selectively impaired, and the kind of impairment is generally related
to the location of the brain damage. Because of this damage-deficit correlation,
research on patients with aphasia has provided a great deal of information about
how language is organized in the brain.
Patients with injuries to Broca’s area may have Broca’s aphasia, as it is often
called today. Broca’s aphasia is characterized by labored speech and certain
kinds of word-finding difficulties, but it is primarily a disorder that affects a
person’s ability to form sentences with the rules of syntax. One of the most
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
notable characteristics of Broca’s aphasia is that the language produced is often
agrammatic, meaning that it frequently lacks articles, prepositions, pronouns,
auxiliary verbs, and other grammatical elements that we will call “function
words” for now. Broca’s aphasics also typically omit inflections such as the past
tense suffix -ed or the third person singular verb ending -s. Here is an excerpt of
a conversation between a patient with Broca’s aphasia and a doctor:
doctor:
patient:
doctor:
patient:
Could you tell me what you have been doing in the hospital?
Yes, sure. Me go, er, uh, P.T. [physical therapy] none o’cot,
speech . . . two times . . . read . . . r . . . ripe . . . rike . . . uh
write . . . practice . . . get . . . ting . . . better.
And have you been going home on weekends?
Why, yes . . . Thursday uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . no . . . Friday . . .
Bar . . . ba . . . ra . . . wife . . . and oh car . . . drive . . .
purpike . . . you know . . . rest . . . and TV.
Broca’s aphasics (also often called agrammatic aphasics) may also have difficulty understanding complex sentences in which comprehension depends
exclusively on syntactic structure and where they cannot rely on their real-world
knowledge. For example, an agrammatic aphasic may have difficulty knowing
who kissed whom in questions like:
Which girl did the boy kiss?
where it is equally plausible for the boy or the girl to have done the kissing; or
might be confused as to who is chasing whom in passive sentences such as:
The cat was chased by the dog.
where it is plausible for either animal to chase the other. But they have less difficulty with:
Which book did the boy read?
or
The car was chased by the dog.
where the meaning can be determined by nonlinguistic knowledge. It is implausible for books to read boys or for cars to chase dogs, and aphasic people can use
that knowledge to interpret the sentence.
Unlike Broca’s patients, people with Wernicke’s aphasia produce fluent speech
with good intonation, and they may largely adhere to the rules of syntax. However, their language is often semantically incoherent. For example, one patient
replied to a question about his health with:
I felt worse because I can no longer keep in mind from the mind of the
minds to keep me from mind and up to the ear which can be to find among
ourselves.
Another patient described a fork as “a need for a schedule” and another,
when asked about his poor vision, replied, “My wires don’t hire right.”
The Human Brain
People with damage to Wernicke’s area have difficulty naming objects presented to them and also in choosing words in spontaneous speech. They may
make numerous lexical errors (word substitutions), often producing jargon and
nonsense words, as in the following example:
The only thing that I can say again is madder or modder fish sudden fishing
sewed into the accident to miss in the purdles.
Another example is from a patient who was a physician before his aphasia.
When asked if he was a doctor, he replied:
Me? Yes sir. I’m a male demaploze on my own. I still know my tubaboys
what for I have that’s gone hell and some of them go.
Severe Wernicke’s aphasia is often referred to as jargon aphasia. The linguistic deficits exhibited by people with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia point to a
modular organization of language in the brain. We find that damage to different
parts of the brain results in different kinds of linguistic impairment (e.g., syntactic versus semantic). This supports the hypothesis that the mental grammar, like
the brain itself, is not an undifferentiated system, but rather consists of distinct
components or modules with different functions.
The kind of word substitutions that aphasic patients produce also tell us
about how words are organized in the mental lexicon. Sometimes the substituted words are similar to the intended words in their sounds. For example, pool
might be substituted for tool, sable for table, or crucial for crucible. Sometimes
they are similar in meaning (e.g., table for chair or boy for girl). These errors
resemble the speech errors that anyone might make, but they occur far more frequently in people with aphasia. The substitution of semantically or phonetically
related words tells us that neural connections exist among semantically related
words and among words that sound alike. Words are not mentally represented in
a simple list but rather in an organized network of connections.
Similar observations pertain to reading. The term dyslexia refers to reading
disorders. Many word substitutions are made by people who become dyslexic
after brain damage. They are called acquired dyslexics because before their
brain lesions they were normal readers (unlike developmental dyslexics, who
have difficulty learning to read). One group of these patients, when reading
words printed on cards aloud, produced the kinds of substitutions shown in the
following examples.
Stimulus
Response 1
Response 2
act
applaud
example
heal
south
play
laugh
answer
pain
west
play
cheers
sum
medicine
east
The omission of function words in the speech of agrammatic aphasics shows
that this class of words is mentally distinct from content words like nouns. A
similar phenomenon has been observed in acquired dyslexia. The patient who
produced the semantic substitutions cited previously was also agrammatic and
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
was not able to read function words at all. When presented with words like
which or would, he just said, “No” or “I hate those little words.” However, he
could read homophonous nouns and verbs, though with many semantic mistakes, as shown in the following:
Stimulus
Response
Stimulus
Response
witch
hour
eye
hymn
wood
witch
time
eyes
bible
wood
which
our
I
him
would
no!
no!
no!
no!
no!
All these errors provide evidence that the mental dictionary has content words
and function words in different compartments, and that these two classes of
words are processed in different brain areas or by different neural mechanisms,
further supporting the view that both the brain and language are structured in a
complex, modular fashion.
Additional evidence regarding hemispheric specialization is drawn from Japanese readers. The Japanese language has two main writing systems. One system,
kana, is based on the sound system of the language; each symbol corresponds to
a syllable. The other system, kanji, is ideographic; each symbol corresponds to
a word. (More about this in chapter 11 on writing systems.) Kanji is not based
on the sounds of the language. Japanese people with left-hemisphere damage
are impaired in their ability to read kana, whereas people with right-hemisphere
damage are impaired in their ability to read kanji. Also, experiments with unimpaired Japanese readers show that the right hemisphere is better and faster than
the left hemisphere at reading kanji, and vice versa.
Most of us have experienced word-finding difficulties in speaking if not in
reading, as Alice did in “Wonderland” when she said:
“And now, who am I? I will remember, if I can. I’m determined to do it!”
But being determined didn’t help her much, and all she could say, after a
great deal of puzzling, was “L, I know it begins with L.”
This tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (often referred to as TOT) is not uncommon. But if you could rarely find the word you wanted, imagine how frustrated
you would be. This is the fate of many aphasics whose impairment involves
severe anomia—the inability to find the word you wish to speak.
It is important to note that the language difficulties suffered by aphasics are
not caused by any general cognitive or intellectual impairment or loss of motor
or sensory controls of the nerves and muscles of the speech organs or hearing
apparatus. Aphasics can produce and hear sounds. Whatever loss they suffer has
to do only with the language faculty (or specific parts of it).
Deaf signers with damage to the left hemisphere show aphasia for sign language similar to the language breakdown in hearing aphasics, even though sign
language is a visual-spatial language. Deaf patients with lesions in Broca’s area
show language deficits like those found in hearing patients, namely severely
dysfluent, agrammatic sign production. Likewise, those with damage to Wer-
The Human Brain
nicke’s area have fluent but often semantically incoherent sign language, filled
with made-up signs. Although deaf aphasic patients show marked sign language
deficits, they have no difficulty producing nonlinguistic gestures or sequences
of nonlinguistic gestures, even though both nonlinguistic gestures and linguistic signs are produced by the same “articulators”—the hands and arms. Deaf
aphasics also have no difficulty in processing nonlinguistic visual-spatial relationships, just as hearing aphasics have no problem with processing nonlinguistic auditory stimuli. These findings are important because they show that the
left hemisphere is lateralized for language—an abstract system of symbols and
rules—and not simply for hearing or speech. Language can be realized in different modalities, spoken or signed, but will be lateralized to the left hemisphere
regardless of modality.
The kind of selective impairments that we find in people with aphasia has
provided important information about the organization of different language
and cognitive abilities, especially grammar and the lexicon. It tells us that language is a separate cognitive module—so aphasics can be otherwise cognitively
normal—and also that within language, separate components can be differentially affected by damage to different regions of the brain.
Historical Descriptions of Aphasia
Interest in aphasia has a long history. Greek Hippocratic physicians reported
that loss of speech often occurred simultaneously with paralysis of the right side
of the body. Psalm 137 states: “If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem, may my right
hand lose its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” This passage also shows that a link between loss of speech and paralysis of the right side
was recognized.
Pliny the Elder (c.e. 23–79) refers to an Athenian who “with the stroke of a
stone fell presently to forget his letters only, and could read no more; otherwise,
his memory served him well enough.” Numerous clinical descriptions of patients
like the Athenian with language deficits, but intact nonlinguistic cognitive systems, were published between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The language difficulties were not attributed to either general intellectual deficits or loss
of memory, but to a specific impairment of language.
Carl Linnaeus in 1745 published a case study of a man suffering from jargon
aphasia, who spoke “as if it were a foreign language, having his own names for
all words.” Another physician of that century reported on a patient’s word substitution errors:
After an illness, she was suddenly afflicted with a forgetting, or, rather, an
incapacity or confusion of speech. . . . If she desired a chair, she would ask
for a table. . . . Sometimes she herself perceived that she misnamed objects;
at other times, she was annoyed when a fan, which she had asked for, was
brought to her, instead of the bonnet, which she thought she had requested.
Physicians of the day described other kinds of linguistic breakdown in detail,
such as a priest who, following brain damage, retained his ability to read Latin
but lost the ability to read German.
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
The historical descriptions of language loss following brain damage foreshadow the later controlled scientific studies of aphasia that have provided
substantial evidence that language is predominantly and most frequently a lefthemisphere function. In most cases lesions to the left hemisphere result in aphasia, but injuries to the right do not (although such lesions result in deficits in
facial recognition, pattern recognition, and other cognitive abilities). Still, caution must be taken. The ability to understand intonation connected with various
emotional states and also to understand metaphors (e.g., The walls have ears),
jokes, puns, double entendres, and the like can be affected in patients with right
hemisphere damage. If such understanding has a linguistic component, then we
may have to attribute some language cognition to the right hemisphere.
Studies of aphasia have provided not only important information regarding where and how language is localized in the brain, but also data bearing on
the properties and principles of grammar that have been hypothesized for nonbrain-damaged adults. For example, the study of aphasia has provided empirical
evidence concerning theories of word structure (chapter 1), sentence formation
(chapter 2), meaning (chapter 3), and sound systems (chapters 4 and 5).
Brain Imaging Technology
The historical descriptions of aphasia illustrate that people have long been fascinated by the brain-language connection. Today we no longer need to rely on surgery or autopsy to locate brain lesions or to identify the language regions of the
brain. Noninvasive brain recording technologies such as computer tomography
(CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can reveal lesions in the living brain shortly after the damage occurs. In addition, positron emission tomography (PET) scans, functional MRI (fMRI) scans, and single photon emission
CT (SPECT) scans provide images of the brain in action. It is now possible to
detect changes in brain activity and to relate these changes to localized brain
damage and specific linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive tasks.
Figures I.4 and I.5 show MRI scans of the brains of a Broca’s aphasic patient
and a Wernicke’s aphasic patient. The black areas show the sites of the lesions.
Each diagram represents a slice of the left side of the brain.
A variety of scanning techniques permit us to measure metabolic activity in
particular areas of the brain. Areas of greater activity are those most involved
in the mental processes at the moment of the scan. Supplemented by magnetic
encephalography (MEG), which measures magnetic fields in the living brain,
these techniques can show us how the healthy brain reacts to particular linguistic stimuli. For example, the brains of normal adults are observed when they
are asked to listen to two or more sounds and determine if they are the same.
Or they may be asked to listen to strings of sounds or read a string of letters
and determine if they are real or possible words, or listen to or read sequences
of words and say whether they form grammatical or ungrammatical sentences.
The results of these studies reaffirm the earlier findings that language resides in
specific areas of the left hemisphere.
Dramatic evidence for a differentiated and structured brain is also provided
by studies of both normal individuals and patients with lesions in regions of the
brain other than Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Some patients have difficulty
speaking a person’s name; others have problems naming animals; and still oth-
The Human Brain
FIGURE I.4 | Three-dimensional reconstruction of the brain of a living patient with
Broca’s aphasia. Note area of damage in left frontal region (dark gray), which was caused
by a stroke.
Courtesy of Hanna Damásio.
FIGURE I.5 | Three-dimensional reconstruction of the brain of a living patient with
Wernicke’s aphasia. Note area of damage in left posterior temporal and lower parietal
region (dark gray), which was caused by a stroke.
Courtesy of Hanna Damásio.
ers cannot name tools. fMRI studies have revealed the shape and location of
the brain lesions in each of these types of patients. The patients in each group
had brain lesions in distinct, nonoverlapping regions of the left temporal lobe.
In a follow-up PET scan study, normal subjects were asked to name persons,
animals, or tools. Experimenters found that there was differential activation in
the normal brains in just those sites that were damaged in the aphasics who were
unable to name persons, animals, or tools.
Further evidence for the separation of cognitive systems is provided by the
neurological and behavioral findings that follow brain damage. Some patients
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
lose the ability to recognize sounds or colors or familiar faces while retaining all
other functions. A patient may not be able to recognize his wife when she walks
into the room until she starts to talk. This suggests the differentiation of many
aspects of visual and auditory processing.
Brain Plasticity and Lateralization in Early Life
It takes only one hemisphere to have a mind.
A. L. WIGAN, The Duality of the Mind, 1844
Lateralization of language to the left hemisphere is a process that begins very
early in life. Wernicke’s area is visibly distinctive in the left hemisphere of the
fetus by the twenty-sixth gestational week. Infants as young as one week old
show a greater electrical response in the left hemisphere to language and in
the right hemisphere to music. A recent study videotaped the mouths of babies
between the ages of five and twelve months when they were smiling and when
they were babbling in syllables (producing sequences like mamama or gugugu).
The study found that during smiling, the babies had a greater opening of the
left side of the mouth (the side controlled by the right hemisphere), whereas during babbling, they had a greater opening of the right side (controlled by the left
hemisphere). This indicates more left hemisphere involvement even at this very
early stage of productive language development (see chapter 7).
While the left hemisphere is innately predisposed to specialize for language,
there is also evidence of considerable plasticity (i.e., flexibility) in the system
during the early stages of language development. This means that under certain circumstances, the right hemisphere can take over many of the language
functions that would normally reside in the left hemisphere. An impressive illustration of plasticity is provided by children who have undergone a procedure
known as hemispherectomy, in which one hemisphere of the brain is surgically
removed. This procedure is used to treat otherwise intractable cases of epilepsy.
In cases of left hemispherectomy after language acquisition has begun, children
experience an initial period of aphasia and then reacquire a linguistic system
that is virtually indistinguishable from that of normal children. They also show
many of the developmental patterns of normal language acquisition. UCLA professor Susan Curtiss and colleagues have studied many of these children. They
hypothesize that the latent linguistic ability of the right hemisphere is “freed” by
the removal of the diseased left hemisphere, which may have had a strong inhibitory effect before the surgery.
In adults, however, surgical removal of the left hemisphere inevitably results
in severe loss of language function (and so is done only in life-threatening circumstances), whereas adults (and children who have already acquired language)
who have had their right hemispheres removed retain their language abilities.
Other cognitive losses may result, such as those typically lateralized to the right
hemisphere. The plasticity of the brain decreases with age and with the increasing specialization of the different hemispheres and regions of the brain.
Despite strong evidence that the left hemisphere is predetermined to be the
language hemisphere in most humans, some evidence suggests that the right
The Human Brain
hemisphere also plays a role in the earliest stages of language acquisition. Children with prenatal, perinatal, or childhood brain lesions in the right hemisphere
can show delays and impairments in babbling and vocabulary learning, whereas
children with early left hemisphere lesions demonstrate impairments in their
ability to form phrases and sentences. Also, many children who undergo right
hemispherectomy before two years of age do not develop language, even though
they still have a left hemisphere.
Various findings converge to show that the human brain is essentially designed
to specialize for language in the left hemisphere but that the right hemisphere is
involved in early language development. They also show that, under the right
circumstances, the brain is remarkably resilient and that if brain damage or surgery occurs early in life, normal left hemisphere functions can be taken over by
the right hemisphere.
Split Brains
© Scott Adams/Dist. by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
People suffering from intractable epilepsy may be treated by severing communication between their two hemispheres. Surgeons cut through the corpus callosum (see Figure I.1), the fibrous network that connects the two halves. When
this pathway is severed, there is no communication between the “two brains.”
Such split-brain patients also provide evidence for language lateralization and
for understanding contralateral brain functions.
The psychologist Michael Gazzaniga states:
With [the corpus callosum] intact, the two halves of the body have no
secrets from one another. With it sectioned, the two halves become two
different conscious mental spheres, each with its own experience base and
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
control system for behavioral operations. . . . Unbelievable as this may
seem, this is the flavor of a long series of experimental studies first carried
out in the cat and monkey.1
When the brain is surgically split, certain information from the left side of
the body is received only by the right side of the brain, and vice versa. To illustrate, suppose that a monkey is trained to respond with both its hands to a certain visual stimulus, such as a flashing light. After the training is complete, the
brain is surgically split. The stimulus is then shown only to the left visual field
(the right hemisphere). Because the right hemisphere controls the left side of the
body, the monkey will perform only with the left hand.
In humans who have undergone split-brain operations, the two hemispheres
appear to be independent, and messages sent to the brain result in different
responses, depending on which side receives the message. For example if a pencil is placed in the left hand of a split-brain person whose eyes are closed, the
person can use the pencil appropriately but cannot name it because only the left
hemisphere can speak. The right brain senses the pencil but the information
cannot be relayed to the left brain for linguistic naming because the connections
between the two halves have been severed. By contrast, if the pencil is placed in
the right hand, the subject is immediately able to name it as well as to describe
it because the sensory information from the right hand goes directly to the left
hemisphere, where the language areas are located.
Various experiments of this sort have provided information on the different
capabilities of the two hemispheres. The right brain does better than the left in
pattern-matching tasks, in recognizing faces, and in spatial tasks. The left hemisphere is superior for language, rhythmic perception, temporal-order judgments,
and arithmetic calculations. According to Gazzaniga, “the right hemisphere as
well as the left hemisphere can emote and while the left can tell you why, the
right cannot.”
Studies of human split-brain patients have also shown that when the interhemispheric visual connections are severed, visual information from the right
and left visual fields becomes confined to the left and right hemispheres, respectively. Because of the crucial endowment of the left hemisphere for language,
written material delivered to the right hemisphere cannot be read aloud if the
brain is split, because the information cannot be transferred to the left hemisphere. An image or picture that is flashed to the right visual field of a split-brain
patient (and therefore processed by the left hemisphere) can be named. However,
when the picture is flashed in the left visual field and therefore “lands” in the
right hemisphere, it cannot be named.
Other Experimental Evidence of Brain Organization
Dichotic listening is an experimental technique that uses auditory signals to
observe the behavior of the individual hemispheres of the human brain. Subjects
hear two different sound signals simultaneously through earphones. They may
hear curl in one ear and girl in the other, or a cough in one ear and a laugh in the
other. When asked to state what they heard in each ear, subjects are more fre1Gazzaniga,
M. S. 1970. The bisected brain. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
The Human Brain
quently correct in reporting linguistic stimuli (words, nonsense syllables, and so
on) delivered directly to the right ear, but are more frequently correct in reporting nonverbal stimuli (musical chords, environmental sounds, and so on) delivered to the left ear. Such experiments provide strong evidence of lateralization.
Both hemispheres receive signals from both ears, but the contralateral stimuli
prevail over the ipsilateral (same-side) stimuli because they are processed more
robustly. The contralateral pathways are anatomically thicker (think of a fourlane highway versus a two-lane road) and are not delayed by the need to cross
the corpus callosum. The accuracy with which subjects report what they hear
is evidence that the left hemisphere is superior for linguistic processing, and the
right hemisphere is superior for nonverbal information.
These experiments are important because they show not only that language
is lateralized, but also that the left hemisphere is not superior for processing all
sounds; it is only better for those sounds that are linguistic. The left side of the
brain is specialized for language, not sound, as we also noted in connection with
sign language research discussed earlier.
Other experimental techniques are also being used to map the brain and to
investigate the independence of different aspects of language and the extent of
the independence of language from other cognitive systems. Even before the
advances in imaging technology of the 1980s and more recently, researchers
were taping electrodes to different areas of the skull and investigating the electrical activity of the brain related to perceptual and cognitive information. In such
experiments scientists measure event-related brain potentials (ERPs), which are
the electrical signals emitted from the brain in response to different stimuli.
For example, ERP differences result when the subject hears speech sounds
versus nonspeech sounds, with a greater response from the left hemisphere to
speech. ERP experiments also show variations in timing, pattern, amplitude,
and hemisphere of response when subjects hear sentences that are meaningless,
such as
The man admired Don’s headache of the landscape.
as opposed to meaningful sentences such as
The man admired Don’s sketch of the landscape.
Such experiments show that neuronal activity varies in location within the
brain according to whether the stimulus is language or nonlanguage, with a left
hemisphere preference for language. Even jabberwocky sentences—sentences that
are grammatical but contain nonsense words, such as Lewis Carroll’s ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves—elicit an asymmetrical left hemisphere ERP response,
demonstrating that the left hemisphere is sensitive to grammatical structure even
in the absence of meaning. Moreover, because ERPs also show the timing of
neuronal activity as the brain processes language, they can provide insight into
the mechanisms that allow the brain to process language quickly and efficiently,
on the scale of milliseconds.
ERP and imaging studies of newborns and very young infants show that from
birth onward, the left hemisphere differentiates between nonlinguistic acoustic
processing and linguistic processing of sounds, and does so via the same neural
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
pathways that adults use. These results indicate that at birth the left hemisphere
is primed to process language, and to do so in terms of the specific localization
of language functions we find in the adult brain.
What is more, these studies have shown that early stages of phonological and
syntactic processing do not require attentional resources but are automatic, very
much like reflexes. For example, even sleeping infants show the asymmetrical
and distinct processing of phonological versus equally different but nonlinguistic acoustic signals; and adults are able to perform a completely unrelated task,
one that takes up considerable attentional resources, at the same time they are
listening to sentences, without affecting the nature or degree of the brain activity that is the neural reflex of automatic, mandatory early syntactic processing.
Experimental evidence from these various neurolinguistic techniques has provided empirical confirmation for theories of language structure. For example,
ERP, fMRI, PET, and MEG studies provide measurable confirmation of discrete
speech sounds and their phonetic properties. These studies also substantiate linguistic evidence that words have an internal structure consisting of morphemes
(chapter 1) and belong to categories such as nouns and verbs. Neurolinguistic
experiments also support the mental reality of many of the syntactic structures
proposed by linguists. Thus neurolinguistic experimentation provides data for
both aspects of neurolinguistics: for helping to determine where and how language is represented and processed in the brain, and for providing empirical support for concepts and hypotheses in linguistic theory.
The results of neurolinguistic studies, which use different techniques and different subject populations, both normal and brain damaged, are converging to
provide the information we seek on the relationship between the brain and various language and nonlanguage cognitive systems. However, as pointed out by
Professors Colin Phillips and Kuniyoshi Sakai,
. . . knowing where language is supported in the human brain is just
one step on the path to finding what are the special properties of those
brain regions that make language possible. . . . An important challenge
for coming years will be to find whether the brain areas implicated in
language studies turn out to have distinctive properties at the neuronal
level that allow them to explain the special properties of human
language.2
The Autonomy of Language
In addition to brain-damaged individuals who have lost their language ability,
there are children without brain lesions who nevertheless have difficulties in
acquiring language or are much slower than the average child. They show no
other cognitive deficits, they are not autistic or retarded, and they have no perceptual problems. Such children are suffering from specific language impairment
2 Phillips,
C., and K. L. Sakai. 2005. Language and the brain. Yearbook of science and technology 2005. Boston: McGraw-Hill Publishers.
The Autonomy of Language
(SLI). Only their linguistic ability is affected, and often only specific aspects of
grammar are impaired.
Children with SLI have problems with the use of function words such as articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs. They also have difficulties with inflectional suffixes on nouns and verbs such as markers of tense and agreement. Several examples from a four-year-old boy with SLI illustrate this:
Meowmeow chase mice.
Show me knife.
It not long one.
An experimental study of several SLI children showed that they produced the
past tense marker on the verb (as in danced) about 27 percent of the time, compared with 95 percent by the normal control group. Similarly, the SLI children
produced the plural marker -s (as in boys) only 9 percent of the time, compared
with 95 percent by the normal children.
Other studies of children with SLI reveal broader grammatical impairments,
involving difficulties with many grammatical structures and operations. However, most investigations of SLI children show that they have particular problems
with verbal inflection, especially with producing tensed verbs (walks, walked),
and also with syntactic structures involving certain kinds of word reorderings
such as Mother is hard to please, a rearrangement of It is hard to please Mother.
In many respects these difficulties resemble the impairments demonstrated by
aphasics. Recent work on SLI children also shows that the different components
of language (phonology, syntax, lexicon) can be selectively impaired or spared.
As is the case with aphasia, these studies of SLI provide important information about the nature of language and help linguists develop theories about the
underlying properties of language and its development in children.
SLI children show that language may be impaired while general intelligence
stays intact, supporting the view of a grammatical faculty that is separate from
other cognitive systems. But is it possible for language to develop normally when
general intelligence is impaired? If such individuals can be found, it argues strongly
for the view that language does not derive from some general cognitive ability.
Other Dissociations of Language and Cognition
[T]he human mind is not an unstructured entity but consists of components which can be
distinguished by their functional properties.
NEIL SMITH AND IANTHI-MARIA TSIMPLI, The Mind of a Savant: Language,
Learning, and Modularity, 1995
There are numerous cases of intellectually handicapped individuals who, despite
their disabilities in certain spheres, show remarkable talents in others. There are
superb musicians and artists who lack the simple abilities required to take care
of themselves. Such people are referred to as savants. Some of the most famous
savants are human calculators who can perform arithmetic computations at phenomenal speed, or calendrical calculators who can tell you without pause on
which day of the week any date in the last or next century falls.
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
Until recently, most such savants have been reported to be linguistically handicapped. They may be good mimics who can repeat speech like parrots, but they
show meager creative language ability. Nevertheless, the literature reports cases
of language savants who have acquired the highly complex grammar of their
language (as well as other languages in some cases) but who lack nonlinguistic
abilities of equal complexity. Laura and Christopher are two such cases.
Laura
Laura was a retarded young woman with a nonverbal IQ of 41 to 44. She lacked
almost all number concepts, including basic counting principles, and could
draw only at a preschool level. She had an auditory memory span limited to
three units. Yet, when at the age of sixteen she was asked to name some fruits,
she responded with pears, apples, and pomegranates. In this same period she
produced syntactically complex sentences like He was saying that I lost my
battery-powered watch that I loved, and She does paintings, this really good
friend of the kids who I went to school with and really loved, and I was like 15
or 19 when I started moving out of home . . .
Laura could not add 2 + 2. She didn’t know how old she was or how old
she was when she moved away from home, nor whether 15 is before or after
19. Nevertheless, Laura produced complex sentences with multiple phrases and
sentences with other sentences inside them. She used and understood passive
sentences, and she was able to inflect verbs for number and person to agree with
the subject of the sentence. She formed past tenses in accord with adverbs that
referred to past time. She could do all this and more, but she could neither read
nor write nor tell time. She did not know who the president of the United States
was or what country she lived in. Her drawings of humans resembled potatoes
with stick arms and legs. Yet, in a sentence imitation task, she both detected and
corrected grammatical errors.
Laura is but one of many examples of children who display well-developed
grammatical abilities, less-developed abilities to associate linguistic expressions
with the objects they refer to, and severe deficits in nonlinguistic cognition.
In addition, any notion that linguistic competence results simply from communicative abilities, or develops to serve communicative functions, is belied by
studies of children with good linguistic skills, but nearly no or severely limited
communicative skills. The acquisition and use of language seem to depend on
cognitive skills different from the ability to communicate in a social setting.
Christopher
Christopher has a nonverbal IQ between 60 and 70 and must live in an institution
because he is unable to take care of himself. The tasks of buttoning a shirt, cutting
his fingernails, or vacuuming the carpet are too difficult for him. However, his
linguistic competence is as rich and as sophisticated as that of any native speaker.
Furthermore, when given written texts in some fifteen to twenty languages, he
translates them quickly, with few errors, into English. The languages include Germanic languages such as Danish, Dutch, and German; Romance languages such
as French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; as well as Polish, Finnish, Greek,
The Autonomy of Language
Hindi, Turkish, and Welsh. He learned these languages from speakers who used
them in his presence, or from grammar books. Christopher loves to study and
learn languages. Little else is of interest to him. His situation strongly suggests
that his linguistic ability is independent of his general intellectual ability.
The question as to whether the language faculty is a separate cognitive system
or whether it is derivative of more general cognitive mechanisms is controversial and has received much attention and debate among linguists, psychologists,
neuropsychologists, and cognitive scientists. Cases such as Laura and Christopher argue against the view that linguistic ability derives from general intelligence because these two individuals (and others like them) developed language
despite other pervasive intellectual deficits. A growing body of evidence supports the view that the human animal is biologically equipped from birth with
an autonomous language faculty that is highly specific and that does not derive
from general human intellectual ability.
Genetic Basis of Language
Studies of genetic disorders also reveal that one cognitive domain can develop
normally along with abnormal development in other domains, and they also
underscore the strong biological basis of language. Children with Turner syndrome (a chromosomal anomaly) have normal language and advanced reading
skills along with serious nonlinguistic (visual and spatial) cognitive deficits.
Similarly, studies of the language of children and adolescents with Williams
syndrome reveal a unique behavioral profile in which certain linguistic functions seem to be relatively preserved in the face of visual and spatial cognitive
deficits and moderate retardation. In addition, developmental dyslexia and SLI
also appear to have a genetic basis. And recent studies of Klinefelter syndrome
(another chromosomal anomaly) show quite selective syntactic and semantic
deficits alongside intact intelligence.
Epidemiological and familial aggregation studies show that SLI runs in families. One such study is of a large multigenerational family, half of whom are language impaired. The impaired members of this family have a very specific grammatical problem: They do not reliably use word-endings or “irregular” verbs
correctly. In particular, they often fail to indicate the tense of the verb. They
routinely produce sentences such as the following:
She remembered when she hurts herself the other day.
He did it then he fall.
The boy climb up the tree and frightened the bird away.
These and similar results show that a large proportion of SLI children have
language-impaired family members, pointing to SLI as a heritable disorder.
Studies also show that monozygotic (identical) twins are more likely to both suffer from SLI than dizygotic (fraternal) twins. Thus evidence from SLI and other
genetic disorders, along with the asymmetry of abilities in linguistic savants,
strongly supports the view that the language faculty is an autonomous, genetically determined module of the brain.
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
Language and Brain Development
“Jump Start” copyright . United Feature Syndicate. Reprinted with permission.
Language and the brain are intimately connected. Specific areas of the brain are
devoted to language, and injury to these areas disrupts language. In the young
child, injury to or removal of the left hemisphere has severe consequences for
language development. Conversely, increasing evidence shows that normal brain
development depends on early and regular exposure to language. (See chapter 7.)
The Critical Period
Under normal circumstances, a child is introduced to language virtually at the
moment of birth. Adults talk to him and to each other in his presence. Children do not require explicit language instruction, but they do need exposure to
language in order to develop normally. Children who do not receive linguistic
input during their formative years do not achieve nativelike grammatical competence. Moreover, behavioral tests and brain imaging studies show that late exposure to language alters the fundamental organization of the brain for language.
The critical-age hypothesis assumes that language is biologically based and
that the ability to learn a native language develops within a fixed period, from
birth to middle childhood. During this critical period, language acquisition
proceeds easily, swiftly, and without external intervention. After this period,
the acquisition of grammar is difficult and, for most individuals, never fully
achieved. Children deprived of language during this critical period show atypical patterns of brain lateralization.
The notion of a critical period is true of many species and seems to pertain to
species-specific, biologically triggered behaviors. Ducklings, for example, during the period from nine to twenty-one hours after hatching, will follow the first
moving object they see, whether or not it looks or waddles like a duck. Such
behavior is not the result of conscious decision, external teaching, or intensive
practice. It unfolds according to what appears to be a maturationally determined
schedule that is universal across the species. Similarly, as discussed in a later section, certain species of birds develop their bird song during a biologically determined window of time.
Instances of children reared in environments of extreme social isolation constitute “experiments in nature” for testing the critical-age hypothesis. The most
Language and Brain Development
dramatic cases are those described as “wild” or “feral” children. A celebrated
case, documented in François Truffaut’s film The Wild Child, is that of Victor,
“the wild boy of Aveyron,” who was found in 1798. It was ascertained that he
had been left in the woods when very young and had somehow survived. In
1920 two children, Amala and Kamala, were found in India, supposedly having
been reared by wolves.
Other children have been isolated because of deliberate efforts to keep them
from normal social intercourse. In 1970, a child called Genie in the scientific
reports was discovered. She had been confined to a small room under conditions
of physical restraint and had received only minimal human contact from the age
of eighteen months until nearly fourteen years.
None of these children, regardless of the cause of isolation, was able to speak
or knew any language at the time they were reintroduced into society. This linguistic inability could simply be caused by the fact that these children received
no linguistic input, showing that language acquisition, though an innate, neurologically based ability, must be triggered by input from the environment. In the
documented cases of Victor and Genie, however, these children were unable to
acquire grammar even after years of exposure, and despite the ability to learn
many words.
Genie was able to learn a large vocabulary, including colors, shapes, objects,
natural categories, and abstract as well as concrete terms, but her grammatical
skills never fully developed. The UCLA linguist Susan Curtiss, who worked with
Genie for several years, reported that Genie’s utterances were, for the most part,
“the stringing together of content words, often with rich and clear meaning, but
with little grammatical structure.” Many utterances produced by Genie at the
age of fifteen and older, several years after her emergence from isolation, are
like those of two-year-old children, and not unlike utterances of Broca’s aphasia
patients and people with SLI, such as the following:
Man motorcycle have.
Genie full stomach.
Genie bad cold live father house.
Want Curtiss play piano.
Open door key.
Genie’s utterances lacked articles, auxiliary verbs like will or can, the thirdperson singular agreement marker -s, the past-tense marker -ed, question words
like who, what, and where, and pronouns. She had no ability to form more complex types of sentences such as questions (e.g., Are you feeling hungry?). Genie
started learning language after the critical period and was therefore never able
to fully acquire the grammatical rules of English.
Tests of lateralization (dichotic listening and ERP experiments) showed that
Genie’s language was lateralized to the right hemisphere. Her test performance
was similar to that found in split-brain and left hemispherectomy patients, yet
Genie was not brain damaged. Curtiss speculates that after the critical period,
the usual language areas functionally atrophy because of inadequate linguistic
stimulation. Genie’s case also demonstrates that language is not the same as communication, because Genie was a powerful nonverbal communicator, despite her
limited ability to acquire language.
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
Chelsea, another case of linguistic isolation, is a woman whose situation also
supports the critical-age hypothesis. She was born deaf but was wrongly diagnosed as retarded. When she was thirty-one, her deafness was finally diagnosed,
and she was fitted with hearing aids. For years she has received extensive language training and therapy and has acquired a large vocabulary. However, like
Genie, Chelsea has not been able to develop a grammar. ERP studies of the
localization of language in Chelsea’s brain have revealed an equal response to
language in both hemispheres. In other words, Chelsea also does not show the
normal asymmetric organization for language.
More than 90 percent of children who are born deaf or become deaf before
they have acquired language are born to hearing parents. These children have
also provided information about the critical age for language acquisition. Because
most of their parents do not know sign language at the time these children are
born, most receive delayed language exposure. Several studies have investigated
the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) among deaf signers exposed to
the language at different ages. Early learners who received ASL input from birth
and up to six years of age did much better in the production and comprehension
of complex signs and sign sentences than late learners who were not exposed to
ASL until after the age of twelve, even though all of the subjects in these studies
had used sign for more than twenty years. There was little difference, however,
in vocabulary or knowledge of word order.
Another study compared patterns of lateralization in the brains of adult
native speakers of English, adult native signers, and deaf adults who had not
been exposed to sign language. The nonsigning deaf adults did not show the
same cerebral asymmetries as either the hearing adults or the deaf signers. In
recent years there have been numerous studies of late learners of sign language,
all with similar results.
The cases of Genie and other isolated children, as well as deaf late learners of
ASL, show that children cannot fully acquire language unless they are exposed
to it within the critical period—a biologically determined window of opportunity during which time the brain is prepared to develop language. Moreover, the
critical period is linked to brain lateralization. The human brain is primed to
develop language in specific areas of the left hemisphere, but the normal process
of brain specialization depends on early and systematic experience with language. Language acquisition plays a critical role in, and may even be the trigger
for, the realization of normal cerebral lateralization for higher cognitive functions in general, not just for language.
Beyond the critical period, the human brain seems unable to acquire the
grammatical aspects of language, even with substantial linguistic training or
many years of exposure. However, it is possible to acquire words and various
conversational skills after this point. This evidence suggests that the critical
period holds for the acquisition of grammatical abilities, but not necessarily for
all aspects of language.
The selective acquisition of certain components of language that occurs
beyond the critical period is reminiscent of the selective impairment that occurs
in various language disorders, where specific linguistic abilities are disrupted.
This selectivity in both acquisition and impairment points to a strongly modularized language faculty. Language is separate from other cognitive systems and
Language and Brain Development
autonomous, and is itself a complex system with various components. In the
chapters that follow, we will explore these different language components.
A Critical Period for Bird Song
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
ROBERT BROWNING, “Home-thoughts, from Abroad,” 1845
Mutts © Patrick McDonnell, King Features Syndicate
Bird song lacks certain fundamental characteristics of human language, such as
discrete sounds and creativity. However, certain species of birds show a critical
period for acquiring their “language” similar to the critical period for human
language acquisition.
Calls and songs of the chaffinch vary depending on the geographic area that
the bird inhabits. The message is the same, but the form or “pronunciation” is
different. Usually, a young bird sings a simplified version of the song shortly
after hatching. Later, it undergoes further learning in acquiring the fully complex version. Because birds from the same brood acquire different chaffinch
songs depending on the area in which they finally settle, part of the song must
be learned. On the other hand, because the fledging chaffinch sings the song of
its species in a simple degraded form, even if it has never heard it sung, some
aspect of it is biologically determined, that is, innate.
The chaffinch acquires its fully developed song in several stages, just as human
children acquire language. There is also a critical period in the song learning of
chaffinches as well as white-crowned sparrows, zebra finches, and many other
species. If these birds are not exposed to the songs of their species during certain
fixed periods after their birth—the period differs from species to species—song
acquisition does not occur. The chaffinch is unable to learn new song elements
after ten months of age. If it is isolated from other birds before attaining the
full complexity of its song and is then exposed again after ten months, its song
will not develop further. If white-crowned sparrows lose their hearing during a
critical period after they have learned to sing, they produce a song that differs
from other white crowns. They need to hear themselves sing in order to produce
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INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
particular whistles and other song features. If, however, the deafness occurs
after the critical period, their songs are normal. Similarly, baby nightingales in
captivity may be trained to sing melodiously by another nightingale, a “teaching
bird,” but only before their tail feathers are grown. After that period, they know
only the less melodious calls of their parents, and nothing more can be done to
further their musical development.
On the other hand, some bird species show no critical period. The cuckoo
sings a fully developed song even if it never hears another cuckoo sing. These
communicative messages are entirely innate. For other species, songs appear to
be at least partially learned, and the learning may occur throughout the bird’s
lifetime. The bullfinch, for example, will learn elements of songs it is exposed to,
even those of another species, and incorporate those elements into its own quiet
warble. In a more recent example of unconstrained song learning, Danish ornithologists report that birds have begun to copy the ring tones of cellular phones.
From the point of view of human language research, the relationship between
the innate and learned aspects of bird song is significant. Apparently, the basic
nature of the songs of some species is present from birth, which means that it
is biologically and genetically determined. The same holds true for human language: Its basic nature is innate. The details of bird song and of human language
are both acquired through experience that must occur within a critical period.
The Development of Language in the Species
As the voice was used more and more, the vocal organs would have been strengthened and
perfected through the principle of the inherited effects of use; and this would have reacted
on the power of speech. But the relation between the continued use of language and the
development of the brain has no doubt been far more important. The mental powers in
some early progenitor of man must have been more highly developed than in any existing
ape, before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use.
CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man, 1871
There is much interest today among biologists as well as linguists in the relationship between the development of language and the evolutionary development of
the human species. Some view language as species specific; some do not. Some
view language ability as a difference in degree between humans and other primates—a continuity view; others see the onset of language ability as a qualitative leap—the discontinuity view.
In trying to understand the development of language, scholars past and present have debated the role played by the vocal tract and the ear. For example, it
has been suggested that speech could not have developed in nonhuman primates
because their vocal tracts were anatomically incapable of producing a large
enough inventory of speech sounds. According to this hypothesis, the development of language is linked to the evolutionary development of the speech production and perception apparatus. This, of course, would be accompanied by
changes in the brain and the nervous system toward greater complexity. Such
a view implies that the languages of our human ancestors of millions of years
ago may have been syntactically and phonologically simpler than any language
Language and Brain Development
known to us today. The notion “simpler” is left undefined, although it has been
suggested that this primeval language had a smaller inventory of sounds.
One evolutionary step must have resulted in the development of a vocal tract
capable of producing the wide variety of sounds of human language, as well as
the mechanism for perceiving and distinguishing them. However, the existence
of mynah birds and parrots is evidence that this step is insufficient to explain
the origin of language, because these creatures have the ability to imitate human
speech, but not the ability to acquire language.
More important, we know from the study of humans who are born deaf and
learn sign languages that are used around them that the ability to hear speech
sounds is not a necessary condition for the acquisition and use of language. In
addition, the lateralization evidence from ERP and imaging studies of people
using sign language, as well as evidence from sign language aphasia, show that
sign language is organized in the brain like spoken language. Certain auditory
locations within the cortex are activated during signing even though no sound is
involved, supporting the contention that the brain is neurologically equipped for
language rather than speech. The ability to produce and hear a wide variety of
sounds therefore appears to be neither necessary nor sufficient for the development of language in the human species.
A major step in the development of language most probably relates to evolutionary changes in the brain. The linguist Noam Chomsky expresses this view:
It could be that when the brain reached a certain level of complexity it
simply automatically had certain properties because that’s what happens
when you pack 1010 neurons into something the size of a basketball.3
The biologist Stephen Jay Gould expresses a similar view:
The Darwinist model would say that language, like other complex organic
systems, evolved step by step, each step being an adaptive solution. Yet
language is such an integrated “all or none” system, it is hard to imagine
it evolving that way. Perhaps the brain grew in size and became capable of
all kinds of things which were not part of the original properties.4
Other linguists, however, support a more Darwinian natural selection development of what is sometimes called “the language instinct”:
All the evidence suggests that it is the precise wiring of the brain’s
microcircuitry that makes language happen, not gross size, shape, or
neuron packing.5
The attempt to resolve this controversy clearly requires more research.
Another point that is not yet clear is what role, if any, hemispheric lateralization
3Chomsky,
N., in Searchinger, G. 1994. The human language series, program 3. Video. New
York: Equinox Film/Ways of Knowing, Inc.
4 Gould, S. J., in Searchinger, G. 1994. The human language series, program 3. Video. New
York: Equinox Film/Ways of Knowing, Inc.
5 Pinker,
S. 1995. The language instinct. New York: William Morrow.
27
28
INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
played in language evolution. Lateralization certainly makes greater specialization possible. Research conducted with birds and monkeys, however, shows that
lateralization is not unique to the human brain. Thus, while it may constitute a
necessary step in the evolution of language, it is not a sufficient one.
We do not yet have definitive answers to the origin of language in the human
brain. The search for these answers goes on and provides new insights into the
nature of language and the nature of the human brain.
Summary
The attempt to understand what makes the acquisition and use of language
possible has led to research on the brain-mind-language relationship. Neurolinguistics is the study of the brain mechanisms and anatomical structures that
underlie linguistic competence and performance. Much neurolinguistic research
is centered on experimental and behavioral data from people with impaired or
atypical language. These results greatly enhance our understanding of language
structure and acquisition.
The brain is the most complex organ of the body, controlling motor and sensory activities and thought processes. Research conducted for more than a century has shown that different parts of the brain control different body functions.
The nerve cells that form the surface of the brain are called the cortex, which
serves as the intellectual decision maker, receiving messages from the sensory
organs and initiating all voluntary actions. The brain of all higher animals is
divided into two parts called the cerebral hemispheres, which are connected by
the corpus callosum, a network that permits the left and right hemispheres to
communicate.
Each hemisphere exhibits contralateral control of functions. The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, and the right hemisphere controls the
left side. Despite the general symmetry of the human body, much evidence suggests that the brain is asymmetric, with the left and right hemispheres lateralized for different functions.
Neurolinguists have many tools for studying the brain, among them dichotic
listening experiments and many types of scans and electrical measurements.
These techniques permit the study of the living brain as it processes language.
By studying split-brain patients and aphasics, localized areas of the brain can be
associated with particular language functions. For example, lesions in the part
of the brain called Broca’s area may suffer from Broca’s aphasia, which results
in impaired syntax and agrammatism. Damage to Wernicke’s area may result in
Wernicke’s aphasia, in which fluent speakers produce semantically anomalous
utterances, or even worse, jargon aphasia, in which speakers produce nonsense
forms that make their utterance uninterpretable. Damage to yet different areas
can produce anomia, a form of aphasia in which the patient has word-finding
difficulties.
Deaf signers with damage to the left hemisphere show aphasia for sign language similar to the language breakdown in hearing aphasics, even though sign
language is a visual-spatial language.
Other evidence supports the lateralization of language. Children who undergo
a left hemispherectomy show specific linguistic deficits, whereas other cognitive
References for Further Reading
abilities remain intact. If the right brain is damaged or removed after the first
two or three years, however, language is unimpaired, but other cognitive disorders may result.
The language faculty is modular. It is independent of other cognitive systems
with which it interacts. Evidence for modularity is found in studies of aphasia,
of children with specific language impairment (SLI), of linguistic savants, and
of children who learn language past the critical period. The genetic basis for
an independent language module is supported by studies of SLI in families and
twins and by studies of genetic anomalies associated with language disorders.
The critical-age hypothesis states that there is a window of opportunity
between birth and middle childhood for learning a first language. The imperfect
language learning of persons exposed to language after this period supports the
hypothesis. Some songbirds also appear to have a critical period for the acquisition of their calls and songs.
References for Further Reading
Caplan, D. 2001. Neurolinguistics. The handbook of linguistics, M. Aronoff and J.
Rees-Miller (eds.). London: Blackwell Publishers.
______. 1992. Language: Structure, processing, and disorders. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
______. 1987. Neurolinguistics and linguistic aphasiology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Coltheart, M., K. Patterson, and J. C. Marshall (eds). 1980. Deep dyslexia. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Curtiss, S. 1977. Genie: A linguistic study of a modern-day “wild child.” New York:
Academic Press.
Curtiss, S., and J. Schaeffer. 2005. Syntactic development in children with hemispherectomy: The I-, D-, and C-systems. Brain and Language 94: 147–166.
Damásio, H. 1981. Cerebral localization of the aphasias.” Acquired aphasia, M. Taylor
Sarno (ed.). New York: Academic Press, 27–65.
Gazzaniga, M. S. 1970. The bisected brain. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Geschwind, N. 1979. Specializations of the human brain. Scientific American 206 (September): 180–199.
Lenneberg, E. H. 1967. Biological foundations of language. New York: Wiley.
Obler, L. K., and K. Gjerlow. 1999. Language and brain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Patterson, K. E., J. C. Marshall, and M. Coltheart (eds.). 1986. Surface dyslexia. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Pinker, S. 1994. The language instinct. New York: William Morrow.
Poizner, H., E. S. Klima, and U. Bellugi. 1987. What the hands reveal about the brain.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Searchinger, G. 1994. The human language series: 1, 2, 3. Videos. New York: Equinox
Film/Ways of Knowing, Inc.
Smith, N. V., and I-M. Tsimpli. 1995. The mind of a savant: Language learning and
modularity. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Springer, S. P., and G. Deutsch. 1997. Left brain, right brain, 5th edn. New York: W. H.
Freeman and Company.
Stromswold, K. 2001. The heritability of language. Language 77(4): 647–721.
Yamada, J. 1990. Laura: A case for the modularity of language. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
29
30
INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
Exercises
1. The Nobel Prize laureate Roger Sperry has argued that split-brain patients
have two minds:
Everything we have seen so far indicates that the surgery has left these
people with two separate minds, that is, two separate spheres of consciousness. What is experienced in the right hemisphere seems to lie
entirely outside the realm of experience of the left hemisphere.
Another Nobel Prize winner in physiology, Sir John Eccles, disagrees. He
does not think the right hemisphere can think; he distinguishes between
“mere consciousness,” which animals possess as well as humans, and language, thought, and other purely human cognitive abilities. In fact, according to him, human nature is all in the left hemisphere.
Write a short essay discussing these two opposing points of view, stating your opinion on how to define “the mind.”
2. A. Some aphasic patients, when asked to read a list of words, substitute
other words for those printed. In many cases, the printed words and the
substituted words are similar. The following data are from actual aphasic patients. In each case, state what the two words have in common
and how they differ:
Printed Word
i.
liberty
canary
abroad
large
short
tall
ii. decide
conceal
portray
bathe
speak
remember
Word Spoken by Aphasic
freedom
parrot
overseas
long
small
long
decision
concealment
portrait
bath
discussion
memory
B. What do the words in groups (i) and (ii) reveal about how words are
likely to be stored in the brain?
3. The following sentences spoken by aphasic patients were collected and analyzed by Dr. Harry Whitaker. In each case, state how the sentence deviates
from normal nonaphasic language.
a. There is under a horse a new sidesaddle.
b. In girls we see many happy days.
c. I’ll challenge a new bike.
d. I surprise no new glamour.
e. Is there three chairs in this room?
Exercises
f.
g.
h.
i.
Mike and Peter is happy.
Bill and John likes hot dogs.
Proliferate is a complete time about a word that is correct.
Went came in better than it did before.
4. The investigation of individuals with brain damage has been a major source
of information regarding the neural basis of language and other cognitive
systems. One might suggest that this is like trying to understand how an
automobile engine works by looking at a damaged engine. Is this a good
analogy? If so, why? If not, why not? In your answer, discuss how a damaged system can or cannot provide information about the normal system.
5. What are the arguments and evidence that have been put forth to support
the notion that there are two separate parts of the brain?
6. Discuss the statement: It only takes one hemisphere to have a mind.
7.
In this chapter, dichotic listening tests in which subjects hear different
kinds of stimuli in each ear were discussed. These tests showed that there
were fewer errors made in reporting linguistic stimuli such as the syllables
pa, ta, and ka when heard through an earphone on the right ear; other
nonlinguistic sounds such as a police car siren were processed with fewer
mistakes if heard by the left ear. This is a result of the contralateral control of the brain. There is also a technique that permits visual stimuli to be
received either by the right visual field, that is, the right eye alone (going
directly to the left hemisphere), or by the left visual field (going directly to
the right hemisphere). What are some visual stimuli that could be used in
an experiment to further test the lateralization of language?
8. The following utterances were made either by Broca’s aphasics or Wernicke’s aphasics. Indicate which is which by writing a “B” or “W” next to
the utterance.
a. Goodnight and in the pansy I can’t say but into a flipdoor you can
see it.
b. Well . . . sunset . . . uh . . . horses nine, no, uh, two, tails want swish.
c. Oh, . . . if I could I would, and a sick old man disflined a sinter, minter.
d. Words . . . words . . . words . . . two, four, six, eight, . . . blaze am he.
9.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet surely had problems. Some say he was obsessed with
being overweight, because the first lines he speaks in the play when alone
on the stage in Act II, Scene 2, are:
O! that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew;
Others argue that he may have had Wernicke’s aphasia, as evidenced by the
following passage from Act II, Scene 2:
Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here
that old men have grey beards, that their faces are
31
32
INTRODUCTION Brain and Language
wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and
plum-tree gum and that they have a plentiful lack of
wit, together with most weak hams: all which, sir,
though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet
I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down, for you
yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab
you could go backward.
Take up the argument. Is Hamlet aphasic? Argue either case.
10. Research projects:
a. Recently, it’s been said that persons born with “perfect pitch” nonetheless need to exercise that ability at a young age or it goes away by
adulthood. Find out what you can about this topic and write a one-page
(or longer) paper describing your investigation. Begin with defining
“perfect pitch.” Relate your discoveries to the critical-age hypothesis
discussed in this chapter.
b. Consider some of the high-tech methodologies used to investigate the
brain discussed in this chapter, such as PET scans and MRIs. What are
the upsides and downsides of the use of these technologies on healthy
patients? Consider the cost, the intrusiveness, and the ethics of exploring a person’s brain weighed against the knowledge obtained from such
studies.
c. Investigate claims that PET scans show that reading silently and reading aloud involve different parts of the left hemisphere.
11. Article review project: Read, summarize, and critically review the article
that appeared in Science, Volume 298, November 22, 2002, by Marc D.
Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, entitled “The Faculty of
Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?”
12. As discussed in the chapter, agrammatic aphasics may have difficulty
reading function words, which are words that have little descriptive content, but they can read more contentful words such as nouns, verbs, and
adjectives.
a. Which of the following words would you predict to be difficult for such
a person?
ore
bee
can (be able to)
but
not
knot
may
be
may
can (metal container) butt
or
will (future) might (possibility)
will (willingness) might (strength)
b. Discuss three sources of evidence that function words and content
words are stored or processed differently in the brain.
13. The traditional writing system of the Chinese languages (e.g., Mandarin,
Cantonese) is ideographic (each concept or word is represented by a distinct
Exercises
character). More recently, the Chinese government has adopted a spelling
system called pinyin, which is based on the Roman alphabet, and in which
each symbol represents a sound. Following are several Chinese words in
their character and pinyin forms. (The digit following the Roman letters in
pinyin is a tone indicator and may be ignored.)
mu4
tree
hua1
flower
ren2
man
jia1
home
gou3
dog
Based on the information provided in this chapter, would the location of
neural activity be the same or different when Chinese speakers read in these
two systems? Explain.
14. Research project: Dame Margaret Thatcher, a former prime minister of the
United Kingdom, has been (famously) quoted as saying: “If you want something said, ask a man . . . if you want something done, ask a woman.” This
suggests, perhaps, that men and women process information differently.
This exercise asks you to take up the controversial question: Are there gender differences in the brain having to do with how men and women process and use language? You might begin your research by seeking answers
(try the Internet) to questions about the incidence of SLI, dyslexia, and language development differences in boys versus girls.
15. Research project: Discuss the concept of emergence and its relevance to the
quoted material of footnotes 3 and 4, as opposed to footnote 5, on page 27.
33
2
Grammatical Aspects
of Language
The theory of grammar is concerned with the question: What is the nature of a
person’s knowledge of his language, the knowledge that enables him to make use
of language in the normal, creative fashion? A person who knows a language has
mastered a system of rules that assigns sound and meaning in a definite way for
an infinite class of possible sentences.
N O A M C H O M S K Y, Language and Mind, 1968
1
Morphology: The
Words of Language
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
EMILY DICKINSON, “A Word Is Dead,” Complete Poems, 1924
Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS
OF EMILY DICKINSON, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
36
Every speaker of every language knows tens of thousands of words. Unabridged
dictionaries of English contain nearly 500,000 entries, but most speakers don’t
know all of these words. It has been estimated that a child of six knows as many
as 13,000 words and the average high school graduate about 60,000. A college
graduate presumably knows many more than that, but whatever our level of
education, we learn new words throughout our lives, such as the many words in
this book that you will learn for the first time.
Words are an important part of linguistic knowledge and constitute a component of our mental grammars, but one can learn thousands of words in a language and still not know the language. Anyone who has tried to communicate in
a foreign country by merely using a dictionary knows this is true. On the other
hand, without words we would be unable to convey our thoughts through language or understand the thoughts of others.
Someone who doesn’t know English would not know where one word begins
or ends in an utterance like Thecatsatonthemat. We separate written words by
spaces, but in the spoken language there are no pauses between most words.
Morphology: The Words of Language
Without knowledge of the language, one can’t tell how many words are in an
utterance. Knowing a word means knowing that a particular sequence of sounds
is associated with a particular meaning. A speaker of English has no difficulty
in segmenting the stream of sounds into six individual words—the, cat, sat, on,
the, and mat—because each of these words is listed in his or her mental dictionary, or lexicon (the Greek word for dictionary), that is part of a speaker’s linguistic knowledge. Similarly, a speaker knows that uncharacteristically, which
has more letters than Thecatsatonthemat, is nevertheless a single word.
The lack of pauses between words in speech has provided humorists with
much material. The comical hosts of the show Car Talk, aired on National Public Radio, close the show by reading a list of credits that includes the following
cast of characters:
Copyeditor:
Accounts payable:
Pollution control:
Purchasing:
Statistician:
Russian chauffeur:
Legal firm:
Adeline Moore (add a line more)
Ineeda Czech (I need a check)
Maury Missions (more emissions)
Lois Bidder (lowest bidder)
Marge Innovera (margin of error)
Picov Andropov (pick up and drop off)
Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe1 (Do we cheat ’em? And
how!)
In all these instances, you would have to have knowledge of English words to
make sense of and find humor in such plays on words.
The fact that the same sound sequences (Lois Bidder—lowest bidder) can be
interpreted differently shows that the relation between sound and meaning is an
arbitrary pairing, as discussed in chapter 6. For example, Un petit d’un petit in
French means “a little one of a little one,” but in English the sounds resemble the
name Humpty Dumpty.
When you know a word, you know its sound (pronunciation) and its meaning. Because the sound-meaning relation is arbitrary, it is possible to have words
with the same sound and different meanings (bear and bare) and words with the
same meaning and different sounds (sofa and couch).
Because each word is a sound-meaning unit, each word stored in our mental
lexicon must be listed with its unique phonological representation, which determines its pronunciation, and with a meaning. For literate speakers, the spelling,
or orthography, of most of the words we know is included.
Each word in your mental lexicon includes other information as well, such
as whether it is a noun, a pronoun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition, or a conjunction. That is, the mental lexicon also specifies the grammatical
category or syntactic class of the word. You may not consciously know that a
form like love is listed as both a verb and a noun, but as a speaker you have such
knowledge, as shown by the phrases I love you and You are the love of my life.
If such information were not in the mental lexicon, we would not know how to
form grammatical sentences, nor would we be able to distinguish grammatical
from ungrammatical sentences.
1“Car
Talk”/ from National Public Radio. Dewey, Cheetham & Howe, 2006, all rights
reserved.
37
38
CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
Dictionaries
Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and
making it hard and inelastic.
AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911
The dictionaries that one buys in a bookstore contain some of the information
found in our mental dictionaries. However, the aim of most early lexicographers, or dictionary makers, was to prescribe rather than describe the words of
a language. They strove to be, as stated in Webster’s dictionaries, the “supreme
authority” of the “correct” pronunciation and meaning of a word. To Samuel
Johnson, whose seminal Dictionary of the English Language was published in
1755, the aim of a dictionary was to “register” (describe) the language, not to
“construct” (prescribe) it.
All dictionaries, from the gargantuan twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to the more commonly used “collegiate” dictionaries, provide the following information about each word: (1) spelling, (2) the “standard” pronunciation, (3) definitions to represent the word’s one or more meanings, and (4) parts
of speech (e.g., noun, verb, preposition). Other information may include the etymology or history of the word, whether the word is nonstandard (such as ain’t) or
slang, vulgar, or obsolete. Many dictionaries provide quotations from published
literature to illustrate the given definitions, as was first done by Dr. Johnson.
Owing to the increasing specialization in science and the arts, specialty and
subspecialty dictionaries are proliferating. Dictionaries of slang and jargon (see
chapter 9) have existed for many years; so have multilingual dictionaries. In
addition to these, the shelves of bookstores and libraries are now filled with dictionaries written specifically for biologists, engineers, agriculturists, economists,
artists, architects, printers, gays and lesbians, transsexuals, runners, tennis players, and almost any group that has its own set of words to describe what they
think and what they do. Our own mental dictionaries include only a small set of
the entries in all of these dictionaries, but each word is in someone’s lexicon.
Content Words and Function Words
“. . . and even . . . the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury found it advisable—”
“Found what?” said the Duck.
“Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly; “of course you know what ‘it’ means.”
“I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when I find a thing,” said the Duck; “it’s generally a
frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”
LEWIS CARROLL, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
Languages make an important distinction between two kinds of words—content words and function words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are the
Content Words and Function Words
content words. These words denote concepts such as objects, actions, attributes,
and ideas that we can think about like children, anarchism, soar, and purple.
Content words are sometimes called the open class words because we can and
regularly do add new words to these classes, such as Bollywood, blog, dis, and
24/7, pronounced “twenty-four seven.”
Other classes of words do not have clear lexical meanings or obvious concepts associated with them, including conjunctions such as and, or, and but;
prepositions such as in and of; the articles the and a/an, and pronouns such as
it. These kinds of words are called function words because they specify grammatical relations and have little or no semantic content. For example, the articles
indicate whether a noun is definite or indefinite—the boy or a boy. The preposition of indicates possession, as in “the book of yours,” but this word indicates
many other kinds of relations too. The it in it’s raining and the archbishop found
it advisable are further examples of words whose function is purely grammatical—they are required by the rules of syntax, and as the cartoon suggests, we
can hardly do without them.
“FoxTrot” copyright . 2000 Bill Amend. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved.
Function words are sometimes called closed class words. It is difficult to
think of any conjunctions, prepositions, or pronouns that have recently entered
the language. The small set of personal pronouns such as I, me, mine, he, she,
and so on are part of this class. With the growth of the feminist movement,
some proposals have been made for adding a genderless singular pronoun. If
such a pronoun existed, it might have prevented the department head in a large
university from making the incongruous statement: “We will hire the best person for the job regardless of his sex.” Various proposals such as “e” have been
put forward, but none are likely to gain acceptance because the closed classes
are unreceptive to new membership. Rather, speakers prefer to recruit existing
pronouns such as they and their for this job, as in “We will hire the best person
for the job regardless of their sex.”
The difference between content and function words is illustrated by the following test that has circulated over the Internet:
39
40
CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
Count the number of F’s in the following text without reading further:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE
RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC
STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
Most people come up with three, which is wrong. If you came up with fewer
than six, count again, and this time, pay attention to the function word of.
This little test illustrates that the brain treats content and function words
(like of ) differently. A great deal of psychological and neurological evidence supports this claim. As discussed in the introduction, some brain-damaged patients
and people with specific language impairments have greater difficulty in using,
understanding, or reading function words than they do with content words.
Some aphasics are unable to read function words like in or which, but can read
the lexical content words inn and witch.
The two classes of words also seem to function differently in slips of the
tongue produced by normal individuals. For example, a speaker may inadvertently switch words producing “the journal of the editor” instead of “the editor
of the journal,” but the switching or exchanging of function words has not been
observed. There is also evidence for this distinction from language acquisition
(discussed in chapter 7). In the early stages of development, children often omit
function words from their speech, as in for example, “doggie barking.”
The linguistic evidence suggests that content words and function words play
different roles in language. Content words bear the brunt of the meaning, whereas
function words connect the content words to the larger grammatical context.
Morphemes: The Minimal
Units of Meaning
“They gave it me,” Humpty Dumpty continued, “for an un-birthday present.”
“I beg your pardon?” Alice said with a puzzled air.
“I’m not offended,” said Humpty Dumpty.
“I mean, what is an un-birthday present?”
“A present given when it isn’t your birthday, of course.”
LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
In the foregoing dialogue, Humpty Dumpty is well aware that the prefix unmeans “not,” as further shown in the following pairs of words:
A
B
desirable
likely
inspired
happy
developed
sophisticated
undesirable
unlikely
uninspired
unhappy
undeveloped
unsophisticated
Morphemes: The Minimal Units of Meaning
Thousands of English adjectives begin with un-. If we assume that the most
basic unit of meaning is the word, what do we say about parts of words like
un-, which has a fixed meaning? In all the words in the B column, un- means
the same thing—“not.” Undesirable means “not desirable,” unlikely means “not
likely,” and so on. All the words in column B consist of at least two meaningful
units: un + desirable, un + likely, un + inspired, and so on.
Just as un- occurs with the same meaning in the previous list of words, so
does phon- in the following words. (You may not know the meaning of some of
them, but you will when you finish this book.)
phone
phonetic
phonetics
phonetician
phonic
phonology
phonologist
phonological
telephone
telephonic
phoneme
phonemic
allophone
euphonious
symphony
Phon- is a minimal form in that it can’t be decomposed. Ph doesn’t mean anything; pho, though it may be pronounced like foe, has no relation in meaning to
it; and on is not the preposition spelled o-n. In all the words on the list, phon has
the identical meaning of “pertaining to sound.”
Words have internal structure, which is rule-governed. Uneaten, unadmired,
and ungrammatical are words in English, but *eatenun, *admiredun, and
*grammaticalun (to mean “not eaten,” “not admired,” “not grammatical”) are
not, because we form a negative meaning of a word not by suffixing un- but by
prefixing it.
When Samuel Goldwyn, the pioneer moviemaker, announced, “In two words:
im-possible,” he was reflecting the common view that words are the basic meaningful elements of a language. We have seen that this cannot be so, because some
words contain several distinct units of meaning. The linguistic term for the most
elemental unit of grammatical form is morpheme. The word is derived from
the Greek word morphe, meaning “form.” If Goldwyn had taken a linguistics
course, he would have said, more correctly, “In two morphemes: im-possible.”
The study of the internal structure of words, and of the rules by which words
are formed, is morphology. This word itself consists of two morphemes, morph
+ ology. The suffix -ology means “science of” or “branch of knowledge concerning.” Thus, the meaning of morphology is “the science of (word) forms.”
Morphology is part of our grammatical knowledge of a language. Like most
linguistic knowledge, this is generally unconscious knowledge.
A single word may be composed of one or more morphemes:
one morpheme
two morphemes
three morphemes
boy
desire
morph (“to change form”)
boy + ish
desire + able
morph + ology
boy + ish + ness
desire + able + ity
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
four morphemes
more than four
gentle + man + li + ness
un + desire + able + ity
un + gentle + man + li + ness
anti + dis + establish + ment + ari + an + ism
A morpheme may be represented by a single sound, such as the morpheme
a meaning “without” as in amoral and asexual, or by a single syllable, such
as child and ish in child + ish. A morpheme may also consist of more than one
syllable: by two syllables, as in camel, lady, and water; by three syllables, as
in Hackensack and crocodile; or by four or more syllables, as in hallucinate,
apothecary, and onomatopoeia.
A morpheme—the minimal linguistic unit—is thus an arbitrary union
of a sound and a meaning (or grammatical function) that cannot be further
analyzed. It is often called a linguistic sign, not to be confused with the sign
of sign languages. This may be too simple a definition, but it will serve our
purposes for now. Every word in every language is composed of one or more
morphemes.
Internet bloggers love to point out “inconsistencies” in the English language.
They observe that while singers sing and flingers fling, it is not the case that fingers “fing.” However, English speakers know that finger is a single morpheme,
or a monomorphemic word. The final -er syllable in finger is not a separate
morpheme because a finger is not “something that fings.”
The meaning of a morpheme must be constant. The agentive morpheme -er
means “one who does” in words like singer, painter, lover, and worker, but the
same sounds represent the comparative morpheme, meaning “more,” in nicer,
prettier, and taller. Thus, two different morphemes may be pronounced identically. The identical form represents two morphemes because of the different
meanings. The same sounds may occur in another word and not represent a separate morpheme at all, as in finger. Conversely, the two morphemes -er and -ster
have the same meaning, but different forms. Both singer and songster mean “one
who sings.” And like -er, -ster is not a morpheme in monster because a monster
is not something that “mons” or someone that “is mon” the way youngster is
someone who is young. All of this follows from the concept of the morpheme as
a sound plus a meaning unit.
The decomposition of words into morphemes illustrates one of the fundamental properties of human language—discreteness. In all languages, sound units
combine to form morphemes, morphemes combine to form words, and words
combine to form larger units—phrases and sentences.
Discreteness is an important part of linguistic creativity. We can combine
morphemes in novel ways to create new words whose meaning will be apparent to other speakers of the language. If you know that “to write” to a disk or
a DVD means to put information on it, you automatically understand that a
writable DVD is one that can take information; a rewritable DVD is one where
the original information can be written over; and an unrewritable DVD is one
that does not allow the user to write over the original information. You know
the meanings of all these words by virtue of your knowledge of the discrete morphemes write, re-, -able, and un-, and the rules for their combination.
Morphemes: The Minimal Units of Meaning
Bound and Free Morphemes
Prefixes and Suffixes
“Dennis the Menace” . Hank Ketcham. Reprinted with permission of
North America Syndicate.
Our morphological knowledge has two components: knowledge of the individual
morphemes and knowledge of the rules that combine them. One of the things we
know about particular morphemes is whether they can stand alone or whether
they must be attached to a base morpheme.
Some morphemes like boy, desire, gentle, and man may constitute words
by themselves. These are free morphemes. Other morphemes like -ish, -ness,
-ly, pre-, trans-, and un- are never words by themselves but are always parts
of words. These affixes are bound morphemes. We know whether each affix
precedes or follows other morphemes. Thus, un-, pre- (premeditate, prejudge),
and bi- (bipolar, bisexual) are prefixes. They occur before other morphemes.
Some morphemes occur only as suffixes, following other morphemes. English
examples of suffix morphemes are -ing (sleeping, eating, running, climbing),
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
-er (singer, performer, reader), -ist (typist, pianist, novelist, linguist), and -ly
(manly, sickly, friendly), to mention only a few.
Many languages have prefixes and suffixes, but languages may differ in how
they deploy these morphemes. A morpheme that is a prefix in one language may
be a suffix in another and vice versa. In English the plural morphemes -s and
-es are suffixes (boys, lasses). In Isthmus Zapotec, spoken in Mexico, the plural
morpheme ka- is a prefix:
zigi
zike
diaga
“chin”
“shoulder”
“ear”
kazigi
kazike
kadiaga
“chins”
“shoulders”
“ears”
Languages may also differ in what meanings they express through affixation.
In English we do not add an affix to derive a noun from a verb. We have the verb
dance as in “I like to dance,” and we have the noun dance as in “There’s a dance
or two in the old dame yet.” The form is the same in both cases. In Turkish, you
derive a noun from a verb with the suffix -ak, as in the following examples:
dur
bat
“to stop”
“to sink”
durak
batak
“stopping place”
“sinking place” or “marsh/swamp”
To express reciprocal action in English we use the phrase each other, as in
understand each other, love each other. In Turkish a morpheme is added to the
verb:
anla
sev
“understand”
“love”
anlash
sevish
“understand each other”
“love each other”
The reciprocal suffix in these examples is pronounced sh after a vowel and
ish after a consonant. This is similar to the process in English, in which we use
a as the indefinite article morpheme before a noun beginning with a consonant,
as in a dog, and an before a noun beginning with a vowel, as in an apple. The
same morpheme may have more than one slightly different form (see exercise 6,
for example). We will discuss the various pronunciations of morphemes in more
detail in chapter 5.
In Piro, an Arawakan language spoken in Peru, a single morpheme, -kaka,
can be added to a verb to express the meaning “cause to”:
cokoruha
salwa
“to harpoon”
“to visit”
cokoruhakaka
salwakaka
“cause to harpoon”
“cause to visit”
In Karuk, a Native American language spoken in the Pacific Northwest, adding -ak to a noun forms the locative adverbial meaning “in.”
ikrivaam
“house”
ikrivaamak
“in a house”
It is accidental that both Turkish and Karuk have a suffix -ak. Despite the
similarity in form, the two meanings are different. Similarly, the reciprocal suffix -ish in Turkish is similar in form to the English suffix -ish as in greenish.
Morphemes: The Minimal Units of Meaning
Similarity in meaning may give rise to different forms. In Karuk the suffix
-ara has the same meaning as the English -y, that is, “characterized by” (hairy
means “characterized by hair”).
aptiik
“branch”
aptikara
“branchy”
These examples illustrate again the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign, that
is, of the sound-meaning relationship, as well as the distinction between bound
and free morphemes.
Infixes
Some languages also have infixes, morphemes that are inserted into other morphemes. Bontoc, spoken in the Philippines, is such a language, as illustrated by
the following:
Nouns/Adjectives
Verbs
fikas
kilad
fusul
fumikas
kumilad
fumusul
“strong”
“red”
“enemy”
“to be strong”
“to be red”
“to be an enemy”
In this language, the infix -um- is inserted after the first consonant of the
noun or adjective. Thus, a speaker of Bontoc who knows that pusi means “poor”
would understand the meaning of pumusi, “to be poor,” on hearing the word for
the first time, just as an English speaker who learns the verb sneet would know
that sneeter is “one who sneets.” A Bontoc speaker who knows that ngumitad
means “to be dark” would know that the adjective “dark” must be ngitad.
Oddly enough, the only infixes in English are full-word obscenities, usually
inserted into adjectives or adverbs. The most common infix in America is the
word fuckin’ and all the euphemisms for it, such as friggin, freakin, flippin, and
fuggin, as in in-fuggin-credible, un-fuckin-believable, or Kalama-flippin-zoo,
based on the city in Michigan. In Britain, a common infix is bloody, an obscene
term in British English, and its euphemisms, such as bloomin’. In the movie and
stage musical My Fair Lady, the word abso + bloomin + lutely occurs in one of
the songs sung by Eliza Doolittle.
Circumfixes
Some languages have circumfixes, morphemes that are attached to a base morpheme both initially and finally. These are sometimes called discontinuous
morphemes. In Chickasaw, a Muskogean language spoken in Oklahoma, the
negative is formed with both a prefix ik- and the suffix -o. The final vowel of
the affirmative is dropped before the negative suffix is added. Examples of this
circumfixing are:
Affirmative
Negative
chokma
lakna
palli
tiwwi
ik + chokm + o
ik + lakn + o
ik + pall + o
ik + tiww + o
“he is good”
“it is yellow”
“it is hot”
“he opens (it)”
“he isn’t good”
“it isn’t yellow”
“it isn’t hot”
“he doesn’t open (it)”
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
An example of a more familiar circumfixing language is German. The past
participle of regular verbs is formed by adding the prefix ge- and the suffix -t to
the verb root. This circumfix added to the verb root lieb “love” produces geliebt,
“loved” (or “beloved,” when used as an adjective).
Roots and Stems
Morphologically complex words consist of a morpheme root and one or more
affixes. Some examples of English roots are paint in painter, read in reread,
ceive in conceive, and ling in linguist. A root may or may not stand alone as a
word (paint and read do; ceive and ling don’t). In languages that have circumfixes, the root is the form around which the circumfix attaches, for example, the
Chickasaw root chokm in ikchokmo (“he isn’t good”). In infixing languages the
root is the form into which the infix is inserted; for example, fikas in the Bontoc
word fumikas (“to be strong”).
Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic have a unique morphological system. Nouns and verbs are built on a foundation of three consonants, and one
derives related words by varying the pattern of vowels and syllables. For example, the root for “write” in Egyptian Arabic is ktb, from which the following
words (among others) are formed by infixing vowels:
katab
kaatib
kitáab
kútub
“he wrote”
“writer”
“book”
“books”
When a root morpheme is combined with an affix, it forms a stem. Other
affixes can be added to a stem to form a more complex stem, as shown in the
following:
root
stem
word
root
stem
word
root
stem
stem
stem
word
Chomsky
Chomsky + ite
Chomsky + ite + s
believe
believe + able
un + believe + able
system
system + atic
un + system + atic
un + system + atic + al
un + system + atic + al + ly
(proper) noun
noun + suffix
noun + suffix + suffix
verb
verb + suffix
prefix + verb + suffix
noun
noun + suffix
prefix + noun + suffix
prefix + noun + suffix + suffix
prefix + noun + suffix + suffix
+ suffix
With the addition of each new affix, a new stem and a new word are formed.
Linguists sometimes use the word base to mean any root or stem to which an
affix is attached. In the preceding example, system, systematic, unsystematic,
and unsystematical are bases.
Rules of Word Formation
Bound Roots
It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my
efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella . . . when I saw
her. . . . She was a descript person. . . . Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she
moved in a gainly way.
JACK WINTER, “How I Met My Wife,” New Yorker, July 25, 1994
“How I Met My Wife” by Jack Winter from The New Yorker, July 25, 1994. Reprinted by permission of
the Estate of Jack Winter.
Bound roots do not occur in isolation and they acquire meaning only in combination with other morphemes. For example, words of Latin origin such as
receive, conceive, perceive, and deceive share a common root, ceive; and the
words remit, permit, commit, submit, transmit, and admit share the root mit.
For the original Latin speakers, the morphemes corresponding to ceive and mit
had clear meanings, but for modern English speakers, Latinate morphemes such
as ceive and mit have no independent meaning. Their meaning depends on the
entire word in which they occur.
A similar class of words is composed of a prefix affixed to a bound root
morpheme. Examples are ungainly, but no *gainly; discern, but no *cern; nonplussed, but no *plussed; downhearted but no *hearted, and others to be seen in
this section’s epigraph.
The morpheme huckle, when joined with berry, has the meaning of a berry
that is small, round, and purplish blue; luke when combined with warm has the
meaning “somewhat.” Both these morphemes and others like them (cran, boysen) are bound morphemes that convey meaning only in combination.
Rules of Word Formation
“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?” The Gryphon lifted
up both its paws in surprise. “Never heard of uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to
beautify is, I suppose?” “Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means—to make—prettier.” “Well,
then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don’t know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.”
LEWIS CARROLL, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
When the Mock Turtle listed the branches of Arithmetic for Alice as “Ambition,
Distraction, Uglification, and Derision,” Alice was very confused. She wasn’t
really a simpleton, since uglification was not a common word in English until
Lewis Carroll used it. Still, most English speakers would immediately know the
meaning of uglification even if they had never heard or used the word before
because they would know the meaning of its individual parts—the root ugly and
the affixes -ify and -cation.
We said earlier that knowledge of morphology includes knowledge of individual morphemes, their pronunciation, and their meaning, and knowledge of the
rules for combining morphemes into complex words. The Mock Turtle added
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
-ify to the adjective ugly and formed a verb. Many verbs in English have been
formed in this way: purify, amplify, simplify, falsify. The suffix -ify conjoined
with nouns also forms verbs: objectify, glorify, personify. Notice that the Mock
Turtle went even further; he added the suffix -cation to uglify and formed a
noun, uglification, as in glorification, simplification, falsification, and purification. By using the morphological rules of English, he created a new word. The
rules that he used are as follows:
Adjective + ify
Verb + cation
S
S
Verb
Noun
“to make Adjective”
“the process of making Adjective”
Derivational Morphology
SHOE © 1987 MACNELLY. KING FEATURES SYNDICATE. Reprinted with permission.
Bound morphemes like -ify and -cation are called derivational morphemes.
When they are added to a base, a new word with a new meaning is derived.
The addition of -ify to pure—purify—means “to make pure,” and the addition
of -cation—purification—means “the process of making pure.” If we invent
an adjective, pouzy, to describe the effect of static electricity on hair, you will
immediately understand the sentences “Walking on that carpet really pouzified
my hair” and “The best method of pouzification is to rub a balloon on your
head.” This means that we must have a list of the derivational morphemes in
our mental dictionaries as well as the rules that determine how they are added
to a root or stem. The form that results from the addition of a derivational morpheme is called a derived word.
Derivational morphemes have clear semantic content. In this sense they are
like content words, except that they are not words. As we have seen, when a
derivational morpheme is added to a base, it adds meaning. The derived word
may also be of a different grammatical class than the original word, as shown by
suffixes such as -able and -ly. When a verb is suffixed with -able, the result is an
adjective, as in desire + able. When the suffix -en is added to an adjective, a verb
is derived, as in dark + en. One may form a noun from an adjective, as in sweet
+ ie. Other examples are:
Rules of Word Formation
Noun to Adjective
Verb to Noun
Adjective to Adverb
boy + -ish
virtu + -ous
Elizabeth + -an
pictur + -esque
affection + -ate
health + -ful
alcohol + -ic
acquitt + -al
clear + -ance
accus + -ation
sing + -er
conform + -ist
predict + -ion
exact + -ly
Noun to Verb
Adjective to Noun
Verb to Adjective
moral + -ize
vaccin + -ate
hast + -en
tall + -ness
specific + -ity
feudal + -ism
free + -dom
read + -able
creat + -ive
migrat + -ory
run(n) + -y
Some derivational suffixes do not cause a change in grammatical class. Prefixes never do.
Noun to Noun
Verb to Verb
Adjective to Adjective
friend + -ship
human + -ity
king + -dom
New Jersey + -ite
vicar + -age
Paul + -ine
America + -n
humanit + -arian
mono- + theism
dis- + advantage
ex- + wife
auto- + biography
un- + do
re- + cover
dis- + believe
auto- + destruct
pink + -ish
red + -like
a- + moral
il- + legal
in- + accurate
un- + happy
semi- + annual
dis- + agreeable
sub- + minimal
When a new word enters the lexicon by the application of morphological
rules, other complex derivations may be blocked. For example, when Commun
+ ist entered the language, words such as Commun + ite (as in Trotsky + ite)
or Commun + ian (as in grammar + ian) were not needed; their formation was
blocked. Sometimes, however, alternative forms do coexist: for example, Chomskyan and Chomskyist and perhaps even Chomskyite (all meaning “follower of
Chomsky’s views of linguistics”). Semanticist and semantician are both used,
but the possible word semantite is not.
Finally, derivational affixes appear to come in two classes. In one class, the
addition of a suffix triggers subtle changes in pronunciation. For example, when
we affix -ity to specific (pronounced “specifik” with a k sound), we get specificity (pronounced “specifisity” with an s sound). When deriving Elizabeth +
an from Elizabeth, the fourth vowel sound changes from the vowel in Beth to
the vowel in Pete. Other suffixes such as -y, -ive, and -ize may induce similar
changes: sane/sanity, deduce/deductive, critic/criticize.
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
On the other hand, suffixes such as -er, -ful, -ish, -less, -ly, and -ness may be
tacked onto a base word without affecting the pronunciation, as in baker, wishful, boyish, needless, sanely, and fullness. Moreover, affixes from the first class
cannot be attached to a base containing an affix from the second class: *need
+ less + ity, *moral + ize + ive; but affixes from the second class may attach to
bases with either kind of affix: moral + iz(e) + er, need + less + ness.
Inflectional Morphology
“Zits” . Zits Partnership. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
Function words like to, it, and be are free morphemes. Many languages, including English, also have bound morphemes that have a strictly grammatical function. They mark properties such as tense, number, person and so forth. Such
bound morphemes are called inflectional morphemes. Unlike derivational morphemes, they never change the grammatical category of the stems to which they
are attached. Consider the forms of the verb in the following sentences:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
I sail the ocean blue.
He sails the ocean blue.
John sailed the ocean blue.
John has sailed the ocean blue.
John is sailing the ocean blue.
In sentence (2) the -s at the end of the verb is an agreement marker; it signifies
that the subject of the verb is third person and is singular, and that the verb is
in the present tense. It doesn’t add lexical meaning. The suffix -ed indicates past
tense, and is also required by the syntactic rules of the language when verbs are
used with have, just as -ing is required when verbs are used with forms of be.
Inflectional morphemes represent relationships between different parts of a
sentence. For example, -s expresses the relationship between the verb and the
third person singular subject; -ing expresses the relationship between the time
the utterance is spoken (e.g., now) and the time of the event. If you say “John is
dancing,” it means John is engaged in this activity while you speak. If you say
“John danced,” the -ed affix places the activity before you spoke. As we will
Rules of Word Formation
discuss in chapter 2, inflectional morphology is closely connected to the syntax
of the sentence.
English also has other inflectional endings such as the plural suffix, which is
attached to certain singular nouns, as in boy/boys and cat/cats. In contrast to
Old and Middle English, which were more richly inflected languages, as we discuss in chapter 10, modern English has only eight bound inflectional affixes:
English Inflectional Morphemes
Examples
-s
-ed
-ing
-en
-s
-’s
-er
-est
She wait-s at home.
She wait-ed at home.
She is eat-ing the donut.
Mary has eat-en the donuts.
She ate the donut-s.
Disa’s hair is short.
Disa has short-er hair than Karin.
Disa has the short-est hair.
third-person singular present
past tense
progressive
past participle
plural
possessive
comparative
superlative
Inflectional morphemes in English follow the derivational morphemes in a
word. Thus, to the derivationally complex word commit + ment one can add a
plural ending to form commit + ment + s, but the order of affixes may not be
reversed to derive the impossible commit + s + ment = *commitsment.
Yet another distinction between inflectional and derivational morphemes is
that inflectional morphemes are productive: they apply freely to nearly every
appropriate base (excepting “irregular” forms such as feet, not *foots). Most
nouns takes an -s inflectional suffix to form a plural, but only some nouns take
the derivational suffix -ize to form a verb: idolize, but not *picturize.
Compared to many languages of the world, English has relatively little inflectional morphology. Some languages are highly inflected. In Swahili, which is
widely spoken in eastern Africa, verbs can be inflected with multiple morphemes,
as in nimepiga (ni + me + pig + a), meaning “he has hit something.” Here the
verb root pig meaning “hit” has two inflectional prefixes: ni meaning “I,” and
me meaning “completed action,” and an inflectional suffix a, which is an object
agreement morpheme.
Even the more familiar European languages have many more inflectional endings than English. In the Romance languages (languages descended from Latin),
the verb has different inflectional endings depending on the subject of the sentence. The verb is inflected to agree in person and number with the subject, as
illustrated by the Italian verb parlare meaning “to speak”:
Io parlo
Tu parli
Lui/Lei parla
“I speak”
“You (singular)
speak”
“He/she speaks”
Noi parliamo
Voi parlate
Loro parlano
“We speak”
“You (plural)
speak”
“They speak”
Russian has a system of inflectional suffixes for nouns that indicates the
noun’s grammatical relation—whether a subject, object, possessor, and so on—
something English does with word order. For example, in English, the sentence
Maxim defends Victor means something different from Victor defends Maxim.
The order of the words is critical. But in Russian, all of the following sentences
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
mean “Maxim defends Victor” (the č is pronounced like the ch in cheese; the š
like the sh in shoe; the j like the y in yet):
Maksim zašiščajet Viktora.
Maksim Viktora zašiščajet.
Viktora Maksim zašiščajet.
Viktora zašiščajet Maksim.2
The inflectional suffix -a added to the name Viktor to derive Viktora shows that
Victor, not Maxim, is defended. The suffix designates the object of the verb,
irrespective of word order.
The grammatical relation of a noun in a sentence is called the case of the
noun. When case is marked by inflectional morphemes, the process is referred to
as case morphology. Russian has a rich case morphology, whereas English case
morphology is limited to the one possessive -s and to its system of pronouns.
Many of the grammatical relations that Russian expresses with its case morphology are expressed in English with prepositions.
Among the world’s languages is a richness and variety of inflectional processes. Earlier we saw how German uses circumfixes to inflect a verb stem to
produce a past particle: lieb to geliebt, similar to the -ed ending of English.
Arabic infixes vowels for inflectional purposes: kitáab “book” but kútub
“books.” Samoan (see exercise 10) uses a process of reduplication—inflecting
a word through the repetition of part or all of the wordː savali “he travels,” but
savavali “they travel.” Malay does the same with whole wordsː orang “person,”
but orang orang “people.” Languages such as Finnish have an extraordinarily
complex case morphology, whereas Mandarin Chinese lacks case morphology
entirely.
Inflection achieves a variety of purposes. In English verbs are inflected with
-s to show third person singular agreement. Languages like Finnish and Japanese have a dazzling array of inflectional processes for conveying everything
from “temporary state of being” (Finnish nouns) to “strong negative intention”
(Japanese verbs). English spoken 1,000 years ago had considerably more inflectional morphology than modern English, as we shall discuss in chapter 10.
In distinguishing inflectional from derivation morphemes we may summarize
as follows:
Inflectional
Derivational
Grammatical function
No word class change
Small or no meaning change
Often required by rules of grammar
Follow derivational morphemes in a word
Productive
Lexical function
May cause word class change
Some meaning change
Never required by rules of grammar
Precede inflectional morphemes in a word
Some productive, many nonproductive
Figure 1.1 sums up our knowledge of how morphemes in English are
classified.
2These
Russian examples were provided by Stella de Bode.
Rules of Word Formation
(ENGLISH) MORPHEMES
BOUND
AFFIX
DERIVATIONAL
PREFIX
preuncon-
ROOT
-ceive
-mit
-fer
FREE
OPEN CLASS
(CONTENT OR
LEXICAL)
WORDS
nouns (girl)
adjectives (pretty)
verbs (love)
adverbs (away)
CLOSED CLASS
(FUNCTION OR
GRAMMATICAL)
WORDS
conjunctions (and)
prepositions (in)
articles (the)
pronouns (she)
auxiliary verbs (is)
INFLECTIONAL
SUFFIX
-ly
-ist
-ment
SUFFIX
-ing -er -s
-s -est -’s
-en
-ed
FIGURE 1.1 | Classification of English morphemes.
The Hierarchical Structure of Words
We saw earlier that morphemes are added in a fixed order. This order reflects
the hierarchical structure of the word. A word is not a simple sequence of morphemes. It has an internal structure. For example, the word unsystematic is
composed of three morphemes: un-, system, and -atic. The root is system, a
noun, to which we add the suffix -atic, resulting in an adjective, systematic. To
this adjective, we add the prefix un- forming a new adjective, unsystematic.
In order to represent the hierarchical organization of words (and sentences),
linguists use tree diagrams. The tree diagram for unsystematic is as follows:
Adjective
3
un
Adjective
3
Noun
atic
g
system
This tree represents the application of two morphological rules:
1.
2.
Noun + atic
un + Adjective
S
S
Adjective
Adjective
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
Rule 1 attaches the derivational suffix -atic to the root noun, forming an
adjective. Rule 2 takes the adjective formed by rule 1 and attaches the derivational prefix un-. The diagram shows that the entire word—unsystematic—is
an adjective that is composed of an adjective—systematic—plus un. The adjective is itself composed of a noun—system—plus the suffix -atic.
Hierarchical structure is an essential property of human language. Words
(and sentences) have component parts, which relate to each other in specific,
rule-governed ways. Although at first glance it may seem that, aside from order,
the morphemes un- and -atic each relate to the root system in the same way,
this is not the case. The root system is “closer” to -atic than it is to un-, and
un- is actually connected to the adjective systematic, and not directly to system.
Indeed, *unsystem is not a word.
Further morphological rules can be applied to the given structure. For example, English has a derivational suffix -al, as in egotistical, fantastical, and astronomical. In these cases, -al is added to an adjective—egotistic, fantastic, astronomic—to form a new adjective. The rule for -al is as follows:
3.
Adjective + al
S
Adjective
Another affix is -ly, which is added to adjectives—happy, lazy, hopeful—to
form adverbs happily, lazily, hopefully. Following is the rule for -ly:
4.
Adjective + ly
S
Adverb
Applying these two rules to the derived form unsystematic, we get the following tree for unsystematically:
Adverb
4
Adjective
ly
4
Adjective
al
4
un
Adjective
3
Noun
atic
g
system
This is a rather complex word. Despite its complexity, it is well-formed because
it follows the morphological rules of the language. On the other hand, a very
simple word can be ungrammatical. Suppose in the above example we first added
un- to the root system. That would have resulted in the nonword *unsystem.
Noun
3
un
Noun
g
system
Rules of Word Formation
*Unsystem is not a possible word because there is no rule of English that
allows un- to be added to nouns. The large soft-drink company whose ad campaign promoted the Uncola successfully flouted this linguistic rule to capture
people’s attention. Part of our linguistic competence includes the ability to recognize possible versus impossible words, like *unsystem and *Uncola. Possible
words are those that conform to the rules; impossible words are those that do
not.
Tree diagrams make explicit the way speakers represent the internal structure of the morphologically complex words in their language. In speaking and
writing, we appear to string morphemes together sequentially as in un + system
+ atic. However, our mental representation of words is hierarchical as well as
linear, and this is shown by tree diagrams.
Inflectional morphemes are equally well represented. The following tree
shows that the inflectional agreement morpheme -s follows the derivational
morphemes -ize and re- in refinalizes:
Verb
4
Verb
s
4
re
Verb
4
Adjective
ize
g
final
The tree also shows that re applies to finalize, which is correct as *refinal
is not a word, and that the inflectional morpheme follows the derivational
morpheme.
The hierarchical organization of words is even more clearly shown by structurally ambiguous words, words that have more than one meaning by virtue of
having more than one structure. Consider the word unlockable. Imagine you
are inside a room and you want some privacy. You would be unhappy to find
the door is unlockable—“not able to be locked.” Now imagine you are inside a
locked room trying to get out. You would be very relieved to find that the door
is unlockable—“able to be unlocked.” These two meanings correspond to two
different structures, as follows:
Adjective
3
un
Adjective
3
Verb
able
g
lock
Adjective
3
Verb
able
3
un
Verb
g
lock
In the first structure the verb lock combines with the suffix -able to form an
adjective lockable (“able to be locked”). Then the prefix un-, meaning “not,”
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
combines with the derived adjective to form a new adjective unlockable (“not
able to be locked”). In the second case, the prefix un- combines with the verb
lock to form a derived verb unlock. Then the derived verb combines with the suffix -able to form unlockable, “able to be unlocked.”
An entire class of words in English follows this pattern: unbuttonable, unzippable, and unlatchable, among others. The ambiguity arises because the prefix
un- can combine with an adjective, as illustrated in rule 2, or it can combine
with a verb, as in undo, unstaple, unearth, and unloosen.
If words were only strings of morphemes without any internal organization,
we could not explain the ambiguity of words like unlockable. These words also
illustrate another important point, which is that structure is important to determining meaning. The same three morphemes occur in both versions of unlockable, yet there are two distinct meanings. The different meanings arise because
of the different structures.
Rule Productivity
“Peanuts” copyright . United Feature Syndicate. Reprinted by permission.
We have noted that some morphological processes, inflection in particular, are
productive, meaning that they can be used freely to form new words from the
list of free and bound morphemes. Among derivational morphemes, the suffix
-able can be conjoined with any verb to derive an adjective with the meaning of
the verb and the meaning of -able, which is something like “able to be” as in
accept + able, laugh + able, pass + able, change + able, breathe + able, adapt +
able, and so on. The productivity of this rule is illustrated by the fact that we
find -able affixed to new verbs such as downloadable and faxable.
The prefix un- derives same-class words with an opposite meaning: unafraid,
unfit, un-American, and so on. Additionally, un- can be added to derived adjec-
Rules of Word Formation
tives that have been formed by morphological rules, resulting in perfectly acceptable words such as un + believe + able or un + pick + up + able.
Yet un- is not fully productive. We find happy and unhappy, cowardly and
uncowardly, but not sad and *unsad, brave and *unbrave, or obvious and
*unobvious. It appears that the “un-Rule” is most productive for adjectives that
are derived from verbs, such as unenlightened, unsimplified, uncharacterized,
unauthorized, undistinguished, and so on. It also appears that most acceptable
un- words have polysyllabic bases, and while we have unfit, uncool, unread, and
unclean, many of the unacceptable -un forms have monosyllabic stems such as
*unbig, *ungreat, *unred, *unsad, *unsmall, *untall.
The rule that adds an -er to verbs in English to produce a noun meaning “one
who does” is a nearly productive morphological rule, giving us examiner, examtaker, analyzer, lover, hunter, and so forth, but fails full productivity owing to
“unwords” like *chairer, which is not “one who chairs.” Other derivational
morphemes fall farther short of productivity. Consider:
sincerity
warmth
moisten
from
from
from
sincere
warm
moist
The suffix -ity is found in many other words in English, like chastity, scarcity,
and curiosity; and -th occurs in health, wealth, depth, width, and growth. We
find -en in sadden, ripen, redden, weaken, and deepen. Still, the phrase “*The
tragicity of Hamlet” sounds somewhat strange, as does “*I’m going to heaten
the sauce.” Someone may say coolth, but when “words” like tragicity, heaten,
and coolth are used, it is usually either a slip of the tongue or an attempt at
humor. Most adjectives will not accept any of these derivational suffixes. Even
less productive to the point of rareness are such derivational morphemes as the
diminutive suffixes in the words pig + let and sap + ling.
In the morphologically complex words that we have seen so far, we can generally predict the meaning based on the meaning of the morphemes that make
up the word. Unhappy means “not happy” and acceptable means “fit to be
accepted.” However, one cannot always know the meaning of the words derived
from free and derivational morphemes by knowing the morphemes themselves.
The following un- forms have unpredictable meanings:
unloosen
unrip
undo
untread
unearth
unfrock
unnerve
“loosen, let loose”
“rip, undo by ripping”
“reverse doing”
“go back through in the same steps”
“dig up”
“deprive (a cleric) of ecclesiastic rank”
“fluster”
Morphologically complex words whose meanings are not predictable must
be listed individually in our mental lexicons. However, the morphological rules
must also be in the grammar, revealing the relation between words and providing the means for forming new words.
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
Exceptions and Suppletions
“Peanuts” copyright . United Feature Syndicate. Reprinted by permission.
The morphological process that forms plural from singular nouns does not apply
to words like child, man, foot, and mouse. These words are exceptions to the
English inflectional rule of plural formation. Similarly, verbs like go, sing, bring,
run, and know are exceptions to the inflectional rule for producing past tense
verbs in English.
When children are learning English, they first learn the regular rules, which
they apply to all forms. Thus, we often hear them say mans and goed. Later in
the acquisition process, they specifically learn irregular plurals like men and
mice, and irregular past tense forms like came and went. These children’s errors
are actually evidence that the regular rules exist. This is discussed more fully in
chapter 7.
Irregular, or suppletive, forms are treated separately in the grammar. That
is, one cannot use the regular rules of inflectional morphology to add affixes to
words that are exceptions like child/children, but must replace the uninflected
form with another word. It is possible that for regular words, only the singular
form need be specifically stored in the lexicon because we can use the inflectional rules to form plurals. But this can’t be so with suppletive exceptions, and
children, mice, and feet must be learned separately. The same is true for suppletive past tense forms and comparative forms. There are regular rules—suffixes
-ed and -er—to handle most cases such as walked and taller, but words like went
and worse need to be learned individually as meaning “goed” and “badder.”
When a new word enters the language, the regular inflectional rules generally
apply. The plural of geek, when it was a new word in English, was geeks, not
*geeken, although we are advised that some geeks wanted the plural of fax to
be *faxen, like oxen, when fax entered the language as a shortened form of facsimile. Never fear: its plural is faxes. The exception to this may be a word “borrowed” from a foreign language. For example, the plural of Latin datum has
always been data, never datums, though nowadays data, the one-time plural, is
treated by many as a singular word like information.
The past tense of the verb hit, as in the sentence “Yesterday you hit the ball,”
and the plural of the noun sheep, as in “The sheep are in the meadow,” show
that some morphemes seem to have no phonological shape at all. We know that
hit in the above sentence is hit + past because of the time adverb yesterday, and
we know that sheep is the phonetic form of sheep + plural because of the plural
verb form are.
Rules of Word Formation
When a verb is derived from a noun, even if it is pronounced the same as an
irregular verb, the regular rules apply to it. Thus ring, when used in the sense of
encircle, is derived from the noun ring, and as a verb it is regular. We say the police
ringed the bank with armed men, not *rang the bank with armed men. In the jargon of baseball one says that the hitter flied out (hit a lofty ball that was caught),
rather than *flew out, because the verb came from the compound noun fly ball.
Indeed, when a noun is used in a compound in which its meaning is lost, such
as flatfoot, meaning “cop,” its plural follows the regular rule, so one says two
flatfoots to refer to a pair of cops slangily, not *two flatfeet. It’s as if the noun is
saying: “If you don’t get your meaning from me, you don’t get my special plural
form.”
Making compounds plural, however, is not always simply adding -s as in girlfriends. Thus for many speakers the plural of mother-in-law is mothers-in-law,
whereas the possessive form is mother-in-law’s; the plural of court-martial is
courts-martial and the plural of attorney general is attorneys general in a legal
setting, but for most of the rest of us it is attorney generals. If the rightmost
word of a compound takes an irregular form, however, the entire compound
generally follows suit, so the plural of footman is footmen, not *footmans or
*feetman or *feetmen.
Lexical Gaps
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment
she quite forgot how to speak good English).
LEWIS CARROLL, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
The redundancy of alternative forms such as Chomskyan/Chomskyite, all of
which conform to the regular rules of word formation, may explain some of
the accidental gaps (also called lexical gaps) in the lexicon. Accidental gaps are
well-formed but nonexisting words. The actual words in a language constitute
only a subset of the possible words. Speakers of a language may know tens of
thousands of words. Dictionaries, as we noted, include hundreds of thousands
of words, all of which are known by some speakers of the language. But no dictionary can list all possible words, because it is possible to add to the vocabulary
of a language in many ways. (Some of these will be discussed here and some in
chapter 10 on language change.) There are always gaps in the lexicon—words
not present but that could be added. Some of the gaps are due to the fact that a
permissible sound sequence has no meaning attached to it (like blick, or slarm,
or krobe). Note that the sequence of sounds must be in keeping with the constraints of the language. *bnick is not a “gap” because no word in English can
begin with a bn. We will discuss such constraints in chapter 5.
Other gaps result when possible combinations of morphemes never come
into use. Speakers can distinguish between impossible words such as *unsystem
and *needlessity, and possible but nonexisting words such as curiouser, linguisticism, and antiquify. The ability to make this distinction is further evidence
that the morphological component of our mental grammar consists of not just a
lexicon—a list of existing words—but also of rules that enable us to create and
understand new words, and to recognize possible and impossible words.
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
Other Morphological Processes
The various kinds of affixation that we have discussed are by far the most common morphological processes among the world’s languages. But, as we continue
to emphasize in this book, the human language capacity is enormously creative,
and that creativity extends to ways other than affixation that words may be
altered and created.
Back-Formations
[A girl] was delighted by her discovery that eats and cats were really eat + -s and cat + -s.
She used her new suffix snipper to derive mik (mix), upstair, downstair, clo (clothes), len
(lens), brefek (from brefeks, her word for breakfast), trappy (trapeze), even Santa Claw.
STEVEN PINKER, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, 1999
Misconception can sometimes be creative, and nothing in this world both misconceives and creates like a child, as we shall see in chapter 7. A new word may
enter the language because of an incorrect morphological analysis. For example,
peddle was derived from peddler on the mistaken assumption that the -er was
the agentive suffix. Such words are called back-formations. The verbs hawk,
stoke, swindle, and edit all came into the language as back-formations—of
hawker, stoker, swindler, and editor. Pea was derived from a singular word,
pease, by speakers who thought pease was a plural.
Some word creation comes from deliberately miscast back-formations. The
word bikini comes from the Bikini atoll of the Marshall Islands. Because the
first syllable bi- is a morpheme meaning “two” in words like bicycle, some clever
person called a topless bathing suit a monokini. Historically, a number of new
words have entered the English lexicon in this way. Based on analogy with such
pairs as act/action, exempt/exemption, and revise/revision, new words resurrect, preempt, and televise were formed from the existing words resurrection,
preemption, and television.
Language purists sometimes rail against back-formations and cite enthuse
and liaise (from enthusiasm and liaison) as examples of language corruption.
However, language is not corrupt; it is adaptable and changeable. Don’t be surprised to discover in your lifetime that shevelled and chalant have infiltrated the
English language to mean “tidy” and “concerned,” and if it happens do not cry
“havoc”; all will be well.
Compounds
[T]he Houynhnms have no Word in their Language to express any thing that is evil, except
what they borrow from the Deformities or ill Qualities of the Yahoos. Thus they denote
the Folly of a Servant, an Omission of a Child, a Stone that cuts their feet, a Continuance
of foul or unseasonable Weather, and the like, by adding to each the Epithet of Yahoo.
For instance, Hnhm Yahoo, Whnaholm Yahoo, Ynlhmnawihlma Yahoo, and an ill contrived
House, Ynholmhnmrohlnw Yahoo.
JONATHAN SWIFT, Gulliver’s Travels, 1726
Two or more words may be joined to form new, compound words. English is
very flexible in the kinds of combinations permitted, as the following table
Rules of Word Formation
of compounds shows. Each entry in the table represents dozens of similar
combinations.
Adjective
Noun
Verb
Adjective
Noun
Verb
bittersweet
headstrong
—
poorhouse
homework
pickpocket
whitewash
spoonfeed
sleepwalk
Some compounds that have been introduced fairly recently into English are
Facebook, YouTube, power nap, and carjack.
When the two words are in the same grammatical category, the compound
will also be in this category: noun + noun = noun, as in girlfriend, fighterbomber, paper clip, elevator-operator, landlord, mailman; adjective + adjective
= adjective, as in icy-cold, red-hot, worldly wise. In English, the rightmost word
in a compound is the head of the compound. The head is the part of a word
or phrase that determines its broad meaning and grammatical category. Thus,
when the two words fall into different categories, the class of the second or final
word determines the grammatical category of the compound: noun + adjective
= adjective, as in headstrong; verb + noun = noun, as in pickpocket. On the
other hand, compounds formed with a preposition are in the category of the
nonprepositional part of the compound, such as (to) overtake or (the) sundown.
This is further evidence that prepositions form a closed-class category that does
not readily admit new members.
Although two-word compounds are the most common in English, it would
be difficult to state an upper limit: Consider three-time loser, four-dimensional
space-time, sergeant-at-arms, mother-of-pearl, man about town, master of ceremonies, and daughter-in-law. Dr. Seuss uses the rules of compounding when
he explains “when tweetle beetles battle with paddles in a puddle, they call it a
tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle.”3
Spelling does not tell us what sequence of words constitutes a compound;
whether a compound is spelled with a space between the two words, with a
hyphen, or with no separation at all depends on the idiosyncrasies of the particular compound, as shown, for example, in blackbird, gold-tail, and smoke screen.
Like derived words, compounds have internal structure. This is clear from
the ambiguity of a compound like top + hat + rack, which can mean “a rack for
top hats” corresponding to the structure in tree diagram (1), or “the highest hat
rack,” corresponding to the structure in (2).
Noun
4
Noun
Noun
3
g
Adjective Noun rack
g
g
top
hat
(1)
3From
Noun
4
Adjective
Noun
g
3
top
Noun
Noun
g
g
hat
rack
(2)
FOX IN SOCKS by Dr. Seuss, Trademark/ & copyright . by Dr. Seuss Enterprises,
L.P., 1965, renewed 1993. Used by permission of Random House Children’s Books, a division
of Random House, Inc., and International Creative Management.
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
Meaning of Compounds
The meaning of a compound is not always the sum of the meanings of its parts;
a blackboard may be green or white. Everyone who wears a red coat is not a
Redcoat (slang for British soldier during the American Revolutionary War). The
difference between the sentences “She has a red coat in her closet” and “She has
a Redcoat in her closet” would have been highly significant in America in 1776.
Other compounds reveal other meaning relations between the parts, which
are not entirely consistent because many compounds are idiomatic (idioms are
discussed in chapter 3). A boathouse is a house for boats, but a cathouse is not
a house for cats. (It is slang for a house of prostitution or whorehouse.) A jumping bean is a bean that jumps, a falling star is a star that falls, and a magnifying
glass is a glass that magnifies; but a looking glass is not a glass that looks, nor
is an eating apple an apple that eats, and laughing gas does not laugh. Peanut
oil and olive oil are oils made from something, but what about baby oil? And is
this a contradiction: “horse meat is dog meat”? Not at all, since the first is meat
from horses and the other is meat for dogs.
In the examples so far, the meaning of each compound includes at least to
some extent the meanings of the individual parts. However, many compounds
nowadays do not seem to relate to the meanings of the individual parts at all.
A jack-in-a-box is a tropical tree, and a turncoat is a traitor. A highbrow does
not necessarily have a high brow, nor does a bigwig have a big wig, nor does an
egghead have an egg-shaped head.
Like certain words with the prefix un-, the meaning of many compounds
must be learned as if they were individual whole words. Some of the meanings
may be figured out, but not all. If you had never heard the word hunchback, it
might be possible to infer the meaning; but if you had never heard the word flatfoot, it is doubtful you would know it means “detective” or “policeman,” even
though the origin of the word, once you know the meaning, can be figured out.
The pronunciation of English compounds differs from the way we pronounce
the sequence of two words that are not compounded. In an actual compound,
the first word is usually stressed (pronounced somewhat louder and higher in
pitch), and in a noncompound phrase the second word is stressed. Thus we stress
Red in Redcoat but coat in red coat. (Stress, pitch, and other similar features are
discussed in chapters 4 and 5.)
Universality of Compounding
Other languages have rules for conjoining words to form compounds, as seen by
French cure-dent, “toothpick”; German Panzerkraftwagen, “armored car”; Russian cetyrexetaznyi, “four-storied”; and Spanish tocadiscos, “record player.” In
the Native American language Tohono O’odham, the word meaning “thing”
is haɁ ichu, and it combines with doakam, “living creatures,” to form the compound haɁ ichu doakam, “animal life.”
In Twi, by combining the word meaning “son” or “child,” ɔ ba, with the word
meaning “chief,” ɔ hene, one derives the compound ɔ heneba, meaning “prince.”
By adding the word “house,” ofi, to ɔ hene, the word meaning “palace,” ahemfi,
is derived. The other changes that occur in the Twi compounds are due to phonological and morphological rules in the language.
Sign Language Morphology
In Thai, the word “cat” is m ɛɛ w, the word for “watch” (in the sense of “to
watch over”) is fâw, and the word for “house” is bâan. The word for “watch cat”
(like a watchdog) is the compound mɛɛ wfâwbâan—literally, “catwatchhouse.”
Compounding is a common and frequent process for enlarging the vocabulary of all languages.
“Pullet Surprises”
Our knowledge of the morphemes and morphological rules of our language is
often revealed by the “errors” we make. We may guess the meaning of a word
we do not know. Sometimes we guess wrong, but our wrong guesses are nevertheless “intelligent.”
Amsel Greene collected errors made by her students in vocabulary-building
classes and published them in a book called Pullet Surprises.4 The title is taken
from a sentence written by one of her high school students: “In 1957 Eugene
O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise.” What is most interesting about these errors is
how much they reveal about the students’ knowledge of English morphology.
The creativity of these students is illustrated in the following examples:
Word
Student’s Definition
deciduous
longevity
fortuitous
gubernatorial
bibliography
adamant
diatribe
polyglot
gullible
homogeneous
“able to make up one’s mind”
“being very tall”
“well protected”
“to do with peanuts”
“holy geography”
“pertaining to original sin”
“food for the whole clan”
“more than one glot”
“to do with sea birds”
“devoted to home life”
The student who used the word indefatigable in the sentence
She tried many reducing diets, but remained indefatigable.
clearly shows morphological knowledge: in meaning “not” as in ineffective; de
meaning “off” as in decapitate; fat as in “fat”; able as in able; and combined
meaning, “not able to take the fat off.” Our contribution to Greene’s collection
is metronome: “a city-dwelling diminutive troll.”
Sign Language Morphology
Sign languages are rich in morphology. Like spoken languages, signs belong to
grammatical categories. They have root and affix morphemes, free and bound
morphemes, lexical content and grammatical morphemes, derivational and
inflectional morphemes, and morphological rules for their combination to form
4 Greene,
A. 1969. Pullet surprises. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
FIGURE 1.2 | Derivationally related sign in ASL.
Copyright . 1987 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press.5
morphologically complex signs. The affixation is accomplished by preceding or
following a particular gesture with another “affixing” gesture.
The suffix meaning “negation,” roughly analogous to -un or -non or -dis,
is accomplished as a rapid turning over of the hand(s) following the end of the
root sign that is being negated. For example, “want” is signed with open palms
facing upward; “don’t want” follows that gesture with a turning of the palms to
face downward. This “reversal of orientation” suffix may be applied, with necessary adjustments, to many root signs.
In sign language many morphological processes are not linear. Rather, the
sign stem occurs nested within various movements and locations in signing space
so that the gestures are simultaneous, an impossibility with spoken languages,
as in the examples in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2 illustrates the derivational process in ASL that is equivalent to
the formation of the nouns comparison and measuring from the verbs compare
and measure in English. Everything about the root morpheme remains the same
except for the movement of the hands.
Inflection of sign roots also occurs in ASL and all other sign languages, which
characteristically modify the movement of the hands and the spatial contours of
the area near the body in which the signs are articulated. For example, movement away from the signer’s body toward the “listener” might inflect a verb as
in “I see you,” whereas movement away from the listener and toward the body
would inflect the verb as in “you see me.”
Morphological Analysis:
Identifying Morphemes
Speakers of a language have knowledge of the internal structure of a word
because their mental grammars include a mental lexicon of morphemes and the
5 Poizner,
Howard, Edward Klima, and Ursula Bellugi. “What the Hands Reveal about the
Brain” figure: “Derivationally related signs in ASL.” © 1987 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press.
Morphological Analysis: Identifying Morphemes
morphological rules for their combination. Of course, mistakes are made while
learning, but these are quickly remedied. (See chapter 7 for details of how children acquire language.)
Suppose you didn’t know English and were a linguist from the planet Zorx
wishing to analyze the language. How would you discover the morphemes of
English? How would you determine whether a word in that language had one,
two, or more morphemes?
The first thing to do would be to ask native speakers how they say various
words. (It would help to have a Zorxese-English interpreter along; otherwise,
copious gesturing is in order.) Assume you are talented in miming and manage
to collect the following forms:
Adjective
Meaning
ugly
uglier
ugliest
pretty
prettier
prettiest
tall
taller
tallest
“very unattractive”
“more ugly”
“most ugly”
“nice looking”
“more nice looking”
“most nice looking”
“large in height”
“more tall”
“most tall”
To determine what the morphemes are in such a list, the first thing a field
linguist would do is to see if some forms mean the same thing in different words,
that is, to look for recurring forms. We find them: ugly occurs in ugly, uglier, and
ugliest, all of which include the meaning “very unattractive.” We also find that
-er occurs in prettier and taller, adding the meaning “more” to the adjectives to
which it is attached. Similarly, -est adds the meaning “most.” Furthermore, by
asking additional questions of our English speaker, we find that -er and -est do
not occur in isolation with the meanings of “more” and “most.” We can therefore conclude that the following morphemes occur in English:
ugly
pretty
tall
-er
-est
root morpheme
root morpheme
root morpheme
bound morpheme “comparative”
bound morpheme “superlative”
As we proceed we find other words that end with -er (e.g., singer, lover,
bomber, writer, teacher) in which the -er ending does not mean “comparative”
but, when attached to a verb, changes it to a noun who “verbs,” (e.g., sings,
loves, bombs, writes, teaches). So we conclude that this is a different morpheme,
even though it is pronounced the same as the comparative. We go on and find
words like number, somber, butter, member, and many others in which the -er
has no separate meaning at all—a somber is not “one who sombs” and a member does not memb—and therefore these words must be monomorphemic.
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Once you have practiced on the morphology of English, you might want to
go on to describe another language. Paku was invented by the linguist Victoria
Fromkin for a 1970s TV series called Land of the Lost, recently made into a
major motion picture of the same name. This was the language used by the
monkey people called Pakuni. Suppose you found yourself in this strange land
and attempted to find out what the morphemes of Paku were. Again, you would
collect your data from a native Paku speaker and proceed as the Zorxian did
with English. Consider the following data from Paku:
me
ye
we
wa
abuma
adusa
abu
Paku
“I”
“you (singular)”
“he”
“she”
“girl”
“boy”
“child”
“one Paku”
meni
yeni
weni
wani
abumani
adusani
abuni
Pakuni
“we”
“you (plural)”
“they (masculine)”
“they (feminine)”
“girls”
“boys”
“children”
“more than one Paku”
By examining these words you find that the plural forms end in -ni and the
singular forms do not. You therefore conclude that -ni is a separate morpheme
meaning “plural” that is attached as a suffix to a noun.
Here is a more challenging example, but the principles are the same. Look for
repetitions and near repetitions of the same word parts, taking your cues from
the meanings given. These are words from Michoacan Aztec, an indigenous language of Mexico:
nokali
nokalimes
mokali
ikali
nopelo
“my house”
“my houses”
“your house”
“his house”
“my dog”
mopelo
mopelomes
ikwahmili
nokwahmili
mokwahmili
“your dog”
“your dogs”
“his cornfield”
“my cornfield”
“your cornfield”
We see there are three base meanings: house, dog, and cornfield. Starting
with house we look for commonalities in all the forms that refer to “house.”
They all contain kali so that makes a good first guess. (We might, and you
might, have reasonably guessed kal, but eventually we wouldn’t know what to
do with the i at the end of nokali and mokali.) With kali as “house” we may
infer that no is a prefix meaning “my,” and that is supported by nopelo, meaning “my dog.” This being the case, we guess that pelo is “dog,” and see where
that leads us. If pelo is “dog” and mopelo is “your dog,” then mo is probably
the prefix for “your.” Now that we think that the possessive pronouns are prefixes, we can look at ikali and deduce that i means “his.” If we’re right about
the prefixes then we can separate out the word for “cornfield” as kwahmili, and
at this point we’re a-rockin’ and a-rollin’. The only morpheme unaccounted for
is “plural.” We have two instances of plurality, nokalimes and mopelomes, but
since we know no, kali, mo, and pelo, it is straightforward to identify the plural
morpheme as the suffix mes.
Summary
In summary of our analysis, then:
kali
pelo
kwahmili
nomoi-mes
“house”
“dog”
“cornfield”
“my”
“your”
“his”
“plural”
By following the analytical principles just discussed, you should be able
to solve some of the more complex morphological puzzles that appear in the
exercises.
Summary
Knowing a language means knowing the morphemes of that language, which
are the elemental units that constitute words. Moralizers is an English word
composed of four morphemes: moral + ize + er + s. When you know a word or
morpheme, you know both its form (sound or gesture) and its meaning; these
are inseparable parts of the linguistic sign. The relationship between form and
meaning is arbitrary. There is no inherent connection between them (i.e., the
words and morphemes of any language must be learned).
Morphemes may be free or bound. Free morphemes stand alone like girl or
the, and they come in two types: open class, containing the content words of the
language, and closed class, containing function words such as the or of. Bound
morphemes may be affixes or bound roots such as -ceive. Affixes may be prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes, and infixes. Affixes may be derivational or inflectional. Derivational affixes derive new words; inflectional affixes, such as the
plural affix -s, make grammatical changes to words. Complex words contain a
root around which stems are built by affixation. Rules of morphology determine
what kind of affixation produces actual words such as un + system + atic, and
what kind produces nonwords such as *un + system.
Words have hierarchical structure evidenced by ambiguous words such as
unlockable, which may be un + lockable “unable to be locked” or unlock + able
“able to be unlocked.”
Some morphological rules are productive, meaning they apply freely to the
appropriate stem; for example, re- applies freely to verbal stems to give words
like redo, rewash, and repaint. Other rules are more constrained, forming words
like young + ster but not *smart + ster. Inflectional morphology is extremely
productive: the plural -s applies freely even to nonsense words. Suppletive forms
escape inflectional morphology, so instead of *mans we have men; instead of
*bringed we have brought.
There are many ways for new words to be created other than affixation.
Compounds are formed by uniting two or more root words in a single word,
such as homework. The head of the compound (the rightmost word) bears the
basic meaning, so homework means a kind of work done at home, but often the
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
meaning of compounds is not easily predictable and must be learned as individual lexical items, such as laughing gas. Back-formations are words created
by misinterpreting an affix look-alike such as er as an actual affix, so the verb
burgle was formed under the mistaken assumption that burglar was burgle + er.
The grammars of sign languages also include a morphological component
consisting of a root, derivational and inflectional sign morphemes, and the rules
for their combination.
Morphological analysis is the process of identifying form-meaning units in a
language, taking into account small differences in pronunciation, so that in- and
im- are seen to be the “same” prefix in English.
References for Further Reading
Anderson, S. R. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Aronoff, M. 1976. Word formation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Bauer, L. 2003. Introducing linguistic morphology, 2nd edn. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Jensen, J. T. 1990. Morphology: Word structure in generative grammar. Amsterdam/
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Katamba, F. 1993. Morphology. New York: Bedford/St. Martins.
Matthews, P. H. 1991. Morphology: An introduction to the theory of word structure,
2nd edn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Stockwell, R., and D. Minkova. 2001. English words: History and structure. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Winchester, S. 2003. The meaning of everything (The story of the Oxford English dictionary). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
______. 1999. The professor and the madman. New York: HarperCollins.
Exercises
1. Here is how to estimate the number of words in your mental lexicon. Consult any standard dictionary.
a. Count the number of entries on a typical page. They are usually boldfaced.
b. Multiply the number of words per page by the number of pages in the
dictionary.
c. Pick four pages in the dictionary at random, say, pages 50, 75, 125, and
303. Count the number of words on these pages.
d. How many of these words do you know?
e. What percentage of the words on the four pages do you know?
f. Multiply the words in the dictionary by the percentage you arrived at in
(e). You know approximately that many English words.
2. Divide the following words by placing a + between their morphemes. (Some
of the words may be monomorphemic and therefore indivisible.)
Exercises
Example: replaces = re + place + s
a. retroactive
b. befriended
c. televise
d. margin
e. endearment
f. psychology
g. unpalatable
h. holiday
i. grandmother
j. morphemic
k. mistreatment
l. deactivation
m. saltpeter
n. airsickness
3. Match each expression under A with the one statement under B that characterizes it.
A
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
B
noisy crow
scarecrow
the crow
crowlike
crows
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
compound noun
root morpheme plus derivational prefix
phrase consisting of adjective plus noun
root morpheme plus inflectional affix
root morpheme plus derivational suffix
grammatical morpheme followed by lexical
morpheme
4. Write the one proper description from the list under B for the italicized part
of each word in A.
A
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
B
terrorized
uncivilized
terrorize
lukewarm
impossible
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
free root
bound root
inflectional suffix
derivational suffix
inflectional prefix
derivational prefix
inflectional infix
derivational infix
5. A. Consider the following nouns in Zulu and proceed to look for the
recurring forms.
umfazi
umfani
umzali
umfundisi
umbazi
“married woman”
“boy”
“parent”
“teacher”
“carver”
abafazi
abafani
abazali
abafundisi
ababazi
“married women”
“boys”
“parents”
“teachers”
“carvers”
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
umlimi
“farmer”
abalimi
“farmers”
umdlali
“player”
abadlali
“players”
umfundi
“reader”
abafundi
“readers”
a. What is the morpheme meaning “singular” in Zulu?
b. What is the morpheme meaning “plural” in Zulu?
c. List the Zulu stems to which the singular and plural morphemes are
attached, and give their meanings.
B. The following Zulu verbs are derived from noun stems by adding a verbal suffix.
fundisa
lima
“to teach”
“to cultivate”
funda
baza
“to read”
“to carve”
d. Compare these words to the words in section A that are related in
meaning, for example, umfundisi “teacher,” abafundisi “teachers,”
fundisa “to teach.” What is the derivational suffix that specifies the
category verb?
e. What is the nominal suffix (i.e., the suffix that forms nouns)?
f. State the morphological noun formation rule in Zulu.
g. What is the stem morpheme meaning “read”?
h. What is the stem morpheme meaning “carve”?
6. Sweden has given the world the rock group ABBA, the automobile Volvo,
and the great film director Ingmar Bergman. The Swedish language offers
us a noun morphology that you can analyze with the knowledge gained
reading this chapter. Consider these Swedish noun forms:
en lampa
en stol
en tidning
lampor
stolar
tidningar
lampan
stolen
tidningaren
lamporna
stolarna
tidningarna
“a lamp”
“a chair”
“a newspaper”
“lamps”
“chairs”
“newspapers”
“the lamp”
“the chair”
“the newspaper”
“the lamps”
“the chairs”
“the newspapers”
en bil
en soffa
en katt
bilar
soffor
kattar
bilen
soffan
katten
bilarna
sofforna
kattarna
“a car”
“a sofa”
“a cat”
“cars”
“sofas”
“cats”
“the car”
“the sofa”
“the cat”
“the cars”
“the sofas”
“the cats”
a. What is the Swedish word for the indefinite article a (or an)?
b. What are the two forms of the plural morpheme in these data? How
can you tell which plural form applies?
c. What are the two forms of the morpheme that make a singular word
definite, that is, correspond to the English article the? How can you tell
which form applies?
d. What is the morpheme that makes a plural word definite?
e. In what order do the various suffixes occur when there is more than
one?
Exercises
f. If en flicka is “a girl,” what are the forms for “girls,” “the girl,” and
“the girls”?
g. If bussarna is “the buses,” what are the forms for “buses” and “the
bus”?
7.
Here are some nouns from the Philippine language Cebuano.
sibwano
ilokano
tagalog
inglis
bisaja
“a Cebuano”
“an Ilocano”
“a Tagalog person”
“an Englishman”
“a Visayan”
binisaja
ininglis
tinagalog
inilokano
sinibwano
“the Visayan language”
“the English language”
“the Tagalog language”
“the Ilocano language”
“the Cebuano language”
a. What is the exact rule for deriving language names from ethnic group
names?
b. What type of affixation is represented here?
c. If suwid meant “a Swede” and italo meant “an Italian,” what would be
the words for the Swedish language and the Italian language?
d. If finuranso meant “the French language” and inunagari meant “the
Hungarian language,” what would be the words for a Frenchman and a
Hungarian?
8. The following infinitive and past participle verb forms are found in Dutch.
Root
Infinitive
Past Participle
wandel
duw
stofzuig
wandelen
duwen
stofzuigen
gewandeld
geduwd
gestofzuigd
“walk”
“push”
“vacuum-clean”
With reference to the morphological processes of prefixing, suffixing, infixing, and circumfixing discussed in this chapter and the specific morphemes
involved:
a. State the morphological rule for forming an infinitive in Dutch.
b. State the morphological rule for forming the Dutch past participle form.
9.
Below are some sentences in Swahili:
mtoto
mtoto
mtoto
watoto
watoto
watoto
mtu
mtu
mtu
watu
watu
watu
kisu
amefika
anafika
atafika
wamefika
wanafika
watafika
amelala
analala
atalala
wamelala
wanalala
watalala
kimeanguka
“The child has arrived.”
“The child is arriving.”
“The child will arrive.”
“The children have arrived.”
“The children are arriving.”
“The children will arrive.”
“The person has slept.”
“The person is sleeping.”
“The person will sleep.”
“The persons have slept.”
“The persons are sleeping.”
“The persons will sleep.”
“The knife has fallen.”
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
kisu
kisu
visu
visu
visu
kikapu
kikapu
kikapu
vikapu
vikapu
vikapu
kinaanguka
kitaanguka
vimeanguka
vinaanguka
vitaanguka
kimeanguka
kinaanguka
kitaanguka
vimeanguka
vinaanguka
vitaanguka
“The knife is falling.”
“The knife will fall.”
“The knives have fallen.”
“The knives are falling.”
“The knives will fall.”
“The basket has fallen.”
“The basket is falling.”
“The basket will fall.”
“The baskets have fallen.”
“The baskets are falling.”
“The baskets will fall.”
One of the characteristic features of Swahili (and Bantu languages in
general) is the existence of noun classes. Specific singular and plural prefixes occur with the nouns in each class. These prefixes are also used for
purposes of agreement between the subject noun and the verb. In the sentences given, two of these classes are included (there are many more in the
language).
a. Identify all the morphemes you can detect, and give their meanings.
Example: -toto “child”
m- noun prefix attached to singular nouns of Class I
a- prefix attached to verbs when the subject is a singular
noun of Class I
Be sure to look for the other noun and verb markers, including tense
markers.
b. How is the verb constructed? That is, what kinds of morphemes are
strung together and in what order?
c. How would you say in Swahili:
(1) “The child is falling.”
(2) “The baskets have arrived.”
(3) “The person will fall.”
10. We mentioned the morphological process of reduplication—the formation
of new words through the repetition of part or all of a word—which occurs
in many languages. The following examples from Samoan illustrate this
kind of morphological rule.
manao
matua
malosi
punou
atamaki
savali
laga
“he wishes”
“he is old”
“he is strong”
“he bends”
“he is wise”
“he travels”
“he weaves”
a. What is the Samoan for:
(1) “they weave”
(2) “they travel”
(3) “he sings”
mananao
matutua
malolosi
punonou
atamamaki
pepese
“they wish”
“they are old”
“they are strong”
“they bend”
“they are wise”
“they sing”
Exercises
b. Formulate a general statement (a morphological rule) that states how to
form the plural verb form from the singular verb form.
11. Following are listed some words followed by incorrect (humorous?)
definitions:
Word
Definition
stalemate
effusive
tenet
dermatology
ingenious
finesse
amphibious
deceptionist
mathemagician
sexcedrin
“husband or wife no longer interested”
“able to be merged”
“a group of ten singers”
“a study of derms”
“not very smart”
“a female fish”
“able to lie on both sea and land”
“secretary who covers up for his boss”
“Bernie Madoff’s accountant”
“medicine for mate who says, ‘sorry, I have a
headache.’”
“hormonal supplement administered as pasta”
“medicine to make you look beautiful”
“say goodbye to those allergies”
“singing in the shower”
“dog that guards the cantaloupe patch”
testostoroni
aesthetominophen
histalavista
aquapella
melancholy
Give some possible reasons for the source of these silly “definitions.” Illustrate your answers by reference to other words or morphemes. For example,
stalemate comes from stale meaning “having lost freshness” and mate
meaning “marriage partner.” When mates appear to have lost their freshness, they are no longer as desirable as they once were.
12. a. Draw tree diagrams for the following words: construal, disappearances,
irreplaceability, misconceive, indecipherable, redarken.
b. Draw two tree diagrams for undarkenable to reveal its two meanings:
“able to be less dark” and “unable to be made dark.”
13. There are many asymmetries in English in which a root morpheme combined with a prefix constitutes a word, but without the prefix is a nonword.
A number of these are given in this chapter.
a. Following is a list of such nonword roots. Add a prefix to each root to
form an existing English word.
Words
Nonwords
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
*descript
*cognito
*beknownst
*peccable
*promptu
*plussed
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
Words
Nonwords
___________
___________
*domitable
*nomer
b. There are many more such multimorphemic words for which the root
morphemes do not constitute words by themselves. Can you list five
more?
14. We have seen that the meaning of compounds is often not revealed by the
meaning of their composite words. Crossword puzzles and riddles often
make use of this by providing the meaning of two parts of a compound and
asking for the resulting word. For example, infielder = diminutive/cease.
Read this as asking for a word that means “infielder” by combining a word
that means “diminutive” with a word which means “cease.” The answer is
shortstop. See if you can figure out the following:
a. sci-fi TV series = headliner/journey
b. campaign = farm building/tempest
c. at-home wear = tub of water/court attire
d. kind of pen = formal dance/sharp end
e. conservative = correct/part of an airplane
15. Consider the following dialogue between parent and schoolchild:
parent: When will you be done with your eight-page book report, dear?
child:
I haven’t started it yet.
parent: But it’s due tomorrow, you should have begun weeks ago. Why
do you always wait until the last minute?
child:
I have more confidence in myself than you do.
parent: Say what?
child:
I mean, how long could it possibly take to read an eight-page
book?
The humor is based on the ambiguity of the compound eight-page book
report. Draw two trees similar to those in the text for top hat rack to reveal
the ambiguity.
16. One of the characteristics of Italian is that articles and adjectives have
inflectional endings that mark agreement in gender (and number) with the
noun they modify. Based on this information, answer the questions that
follow the list of Italian phrases.
un uomo
un uomo robusto
un uomo robustissimo
una donna robusta
un vino rosso
una faccia
un vento secco
“a man”
“a robust man”
“a very robust man”
“a robust woman”
“a red wine”
“a face”
“a dry wind”
a. What is the root morpheme meaning “robust”?
b. What is the morpheme meaning “very”?
Exercises
c. What is the Italian for:
(1) “a robust wine”
(2) “a very red face”
(3) “a very dry wine”
17. Following is a list of words from Turkish. In Turkish, articles and morphemes indicating location are affixed to the noun.
deniz
denize
denizin
eve
“an ocean”
“to an ocean”
“of an ocean”
“to a house”
evden
evimden
denizimde
elde
“from a house”
“from my house”
“in my ocean”
“in a hand”
a. What is the Turkish morpheme meaning “to”?
b. What kind of affixes in Turkish corresponds to English prepositions
(e.g., prefixes, suffixes, infixes, free morphemes)?
c. What would the Turkish word for “from an ocean” be?
d. How many morphemes are there in the Turkish word denizimde?
18. The following are some verb forms in Chickasaw, a member of the
Muskogean family of languages spoken in south-central Oklahoma.6
Chickasaw is an endangered language. Currently, there are only about 100
speakers of Chickasaw, most of whom are over 70 years old.
sachaaha
chaaha
chichaaha
hoochaaha
satikahbi
chitikahbitok
chichchokwa
hopobatok
hoohopobatok
sahopoba
“I am tall”
“he/she is tall”
“you are tall”
“they are tall”
“I am tired”
“you were tired”
“you are cold”
“he was hungry”
“they were hungry”
“I am hungry”
a. What is the root morpheme for the following verbs?
(1) “to be tall”
(2) “to be hungry”
b. What is the morpheme meaning:
(1) past tense
(2) “I”
(3) “you”
(4) “he/she”
c. If the Chickasaw root for “to be old” is sipokni, how would you say:
(1) “You are old”
(2) “He was old”
(3) “They are old”
6 The
Chickasaw examples are provided by Pamela Munro.
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CHAPTER 1 Morphology: The Words of Language
19. The language Little-End Egglish, whose source is revealed in exercise 14,
chapter 10, exhibits the following data:
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
kul
vet
rok
ver
gup
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
v.
“omelet”
“yolk (of egg)”
“egg”
“egg shell”
“soufflé”
zkulego
zvetego
zrokego
zverego
zgupego
“my omelet”
“my yolk”
“my egg”
“my egg shell”
“my soufflé”
zkulivo
zvetivo
zrokivo
zverivo
zgupivo
“your omelet”
“your yolk”
“your egg”
“your egg shell”
“your soufflé”
Isolate the morphemes that indicate possession, first person singular, and second person (we don’t know whether singular, plural, or
both). Indicate whether the affixes are prefixes or suffixes.
Given that vel means egg white, how would a Little-End Egglisher
say “my egg white”?
Given that zpeivo means “your hard-boiled egg,” what is the word
meaning “hard-boiled egg”?
If you knew that zvetgogo meant “our egg yolk,” what would be
likely to be the morpheme meaning “our”?
If you knew that borokego meant “for my egg,” what would be
likely to be the morpheme bearing the benefactive meaning “for”?
20. Research project: Consider what are called “interfixes” such as -o- in
English jack-o-lantern. They are said to be meaningless morphemes
attached to two morphemes at once. What can you learn about that
notion? Where do you think the -o- comes from? Are there languages
other than English that have interfixes?
2
Syntax: The Sentence
Patterns of Language
To grammar even kings bow.
J. B. MOLIÈRE, Les Femmes Savantes, II, 1672
It is an astonishing fact that any speaker of any human language can produce
and understand an infinite number of sentences. We can show this quite easily
through examples such as the following:
The kindhearted boy had many girlfriends.
The kindhearted, intelligent boy had many girlfriends.
The kindhearted, intelligent, handsome boy had many girlfriends.
.
.
.
John found a book in the library.
John found a book in the library in the stacks.
John found a book in the library in the stacks on the fourth floor.
.
.
.
The cat chased the mouse.
The cat chased the mouse that ate the cheese.
The cat chased the mouse that ate the cheese that came from the cow.
The cat chased the mouse that ate the cheese that came from the cow that grazed
in the field.
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
In each case the speaker could continue creating sentences by adding another
adjective, prepositional phrase, or relative clause. In principle, this could go on
forever. All languages have mechanisms of this sort that make the number of
sentences limitless. Given this fact, the sentences of a language cannot be stored
in a dictionary format in our heads. Rather, sentences are composed of discrete
units that are combined by rules. This system of rules explains how speakers can
store infinite knowledge in a finite space—our brains.
The part of grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge of sentences and
their structures is called syntax. The aim of this chapter is to show you what
syntactic structures look like and to familiarize you with some of the rules that
determine them. Most of the examples will be from the syntax of English, but
the principles that account for syntactic structures are universal.
What the Syntax Rules Do
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied, “at least—I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I
eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same
thing as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse . . . “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the
same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter.
LEWIS CARROLL, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
The rules of syntax combine words into phrases and phrases into sentences.
Among other things, the rules specify the correct word order for a language.
For example, English is a Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) language. The English
sentence in (1) is grammatical because the words occur in the right order; the
sentence in (2) is ungrammatical because the word order is incorrect for English.
(Recall that the asterisk or star preceding a sentence is the linguistic convention
for indicating that the sentence is ungrammatical or ill-formed according to the
rules of the grammar.)
1.
2.
The President nominated a new Supreme Court justice.
*President the new Supreme justice Court a nominated.
A second important role of the syntax is to describe the relationship between
the meaning of a particular group of words and the arrangement of those words.
For example, Alice’s companions show us that the word order of a sentence contributes crucially to its meaning. The sentences in (3) and (4) contain the same
words, but the meanings are quite different, as the Mad Hatter points out.
3.
4.
I mean what I say.
I say what I mean.
What the Syntax Rules Do
The rules of the syntax also specify the grammatical relations of a sentence,
such as subject and direct object. In other words, they provide the information
about who is doing what to whom. This information is crucial to understanding
the meaning of a sentence. For example, the grammatical relations in (5) and (6)
are reversed, so the otherwise identical sentences have very different meanings.
5.
6.
Your dog chased my cat.
My cat chased your dog.
Syntactic rules also specify other constraints that sentences must adhere to.
Consider, for example, the sentences in (7). As an exercise you can first read
through them and place a star before those sentences that you consider to be
ungrammatical.
7.
(a) The boy found.
(b) The boy found quickly.
(c) The boy found in the house.
(d) The boy found the ball.
We predict that you will find the sentence in (7d) grammatical and the ones in
(7a–c) ungrammatical. This is because the syntax rules specify that a verb like
found must be followed by something, and that something cannot be an expression like quickly or in the house but must be like the ball.
Similarly, we expect you will find the sentence in (8b) grammatical while the
sentence in (8a) is not.
8.
(a) Disa slept the baby.
(b) Disa slept soundly.
The verb sleep patterns differently than find in that it may be followed solely
by a word like soundly but not by other kinds of phrases such as the baby.
We also predict that you’ll find that the sentences in (9a, d, e, f) are grammatical and that (9b, c) are not. The examples in (9) show that specific verbs,
such as believe, try, and want, behave differently with respect to the patterns of
words that may follow them.
9.
(a) Zack believes Robert to be a gentleman.
(b) Zack believes to be a gentleman.
(c) Zack tries Robert to be a gentleman.
(d) Zack tries to be a gentleman.
(e) Zack wants to be a gentleman.
(f) Zack wants Robert to be a gentleman.
The fact that all native speakers have the same judgments about the sentences in (7) to (9) tells us that grammatical judgments are neither idiosyncratic
nor capricious, but are determined by rules that are shared by all speakers of a
language.
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In (10) we see that the phrase ran up the hill behaves differently from the
phrase ran up the bill, even though the two phrases are superficially quite similar. For the expression ran up the hill, the rules of the syntax allow the word
orders in (10a) and (10c), but not (10b). In ran up the bill, in contrast, the rules
allow the order in (10d) and (10e), but not (10f).
10. (a) Jack and Jill ran up the hill.
(b) Jack and Jill ran the hill up.
(c) Up the hill ran Jack and Jill.
(d) Jack and Jill ran up the bill.
(e) Jack and Jill ran the bill up.
(f) Up the bill ran Jack and Jill.
The pattern shown in (10) illustrates that sentences are not simply strings of
words with no further organization. If they were, there would be no reason to
expect ran up the hill to pattern differently from ran up the bill. These phrases
act differently because they have different syntactic structures associated with
them. In ran up the hill, the words up the hill form a unit, as follows:
He ran [up the hill]
The whole unit can be moved to the beginning of the sentence, as in (10c), but
we cannot rearrange its subparts, as shown in (10b). On the other hand, in ran
up the bill, the words up the bill do not form a natural unit, so they cannot be
moved, and (10f) is ungrammatical.
Our syntactic knowledge crucially includes rules that tell us how words form
groups in a sentence, or how they are hierarchically arranged with respect to one
another. Consider the following sentence:
The captain ordered all old men and women off the sinking ship.
This phrase “old men and women” is ambiguous, referring either to old men
and to women of any age or to old men and old women. The ambiguity arises
because the words old men and women can be grouped in two ways. If the
words are grouped as follows, old modifies only men and so the women can be
any age.
[old men] and [women]
When we group them like this, the adjective old modifies both men and
women.
[old [men and women]]
The rules of syntax allow both of these groupings, which is why the expression
is ambiguous. The following hierarchical diagrams illustrate the same point:
old
men
and
women
g
old
men
and women
What the Syntax Rules Do
In the first structure old and men are under the same node and hence old
modifies men. In the second structure old shares a node with the entire conjunction men and women, and so modifies both.
This is similar to what we find in morphology for ambiguous words such as
unlockable, which have two structures, corresponding to two meanings, as discussed in chapter 1.
Many sentences exhibit such ambiguities, often leading to humorous results.
Consider the following two sentences, which appeared in classified ads:
For sale: an antique desk suitable for lady with thick legs and large drawers.
We will oil your sewing machine and adjust tension in your home for $10.00.
In the first ad, the humorous reading comes from the grouping [a desk] [for
lady with thick legs and large drawers] as opposed to the intended [a desk for
lady] [with thick legs and large drawers], where the legs and drawers belong to
the desk. The second case is similar.
Because these ambiguities are a result of different structures, they are instances
of structural ambiguity.
Contrast these sentences with:
This will make you smart.
The two interpretations of this sentence are due to the two meanings of smart—
“clever” or “burning sensation.” Such lexical or word-meaning ambiguities, as
opposed to structural ambiguities, will be discussed in chapter 3.
Often a combination of differing structure and double word-meaning creates
ambiguity (and humor) as in the cartoon:
Rhymes With Orange (105945) © Hilary B. Price. King Features Syndicate
Waitress’s
nose
ring
Waitress’s
nose
ring
Syntactic rules reveal the grammatical relations among the words of a sentence as well as their order and hierarchical organization. They also explain
how the grouping of words relates to its meaning, such as when a sentence or
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phrase is ambiguous. In addition, the rules of the syntax permit speakers to produce and understand a limitless number of sentences never produced or heard
before—the creative aspect of linguistic knowledge. A major goal of linguistics
is to show clearly and explicitly how syntactic rules account for this knowledge.
A theory of grammar must provide a complete characterization of what speakers
implicitly know about their language.
What Grammaticality Is Not Based On
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This is a very interesting sentence, because it shows that
syntax can be separated from semantics—that form can be separated from meaning. The
sentence doesn’t seem to mean anything coherent, but it sounds like an English sentence.
HOWARD LASNIK, The Human Language: Part One, 1995
Importantly, a person’s ability to make grammaticality judgments does not
depend on having heard the sentence before. You may never have heard or read
the sentence
Enormous crickets in pink socks danced at the prom.
but your syntactic knowledge tells you that it is grammatical. As we showed
at the beginning of this chapter, people are able to understand, produce, and
make judgments about an infinite range of sentences, most of which they have
never heard before. This ability illustrates that our knowledge of language is
creative—not creative in the sense that we are all poets, which we are not, but
creative in that none of us is limited to a fixed repertoire of expressions. Rather,
we can exploit the resources of our language and grammar to produce and
understand a limitless number of sentences embodying a limitless range of ideas
and emotions.
We showed that the structure of a sentence contributes to its meaning. However, grammaticality and meaningfulness are not the same thing, as shown by
the following sentences:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
A verb crumpled the milk.
Although these sentences do not make much sense, they are syntactically well
formed. They sound funny, but their funniness is different from what we find in
the following strings of words:
*Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.
*Milk the crumpled verb a.
There are also sentences that we understand even though they are not well
formed according to the rules of the syntax. For example, most English speakers
could interpret
*The boy quickly in the house the ball found.
although they know that the word order is incorrect. Similarly, we could probably assign a meaning to sentence (8a) (Disa slept the baby) in the previous sec-
Sentence Structure
tion. If asked to fix it up, we would probably come up with something like “Disa
put the baby to sleep,” but we also know that as it stands, (8a) is not a possible
sentence of English. To be a sentence, words must conform to specific patterns
determined by the syntactic rules of the language.
Some sentences are grammatical even though they are difficult to interpret
because they include nonsense words, that is, words with no agreed-on meaning.
This is illustrated by the following lines from the poem “Jabberwocky” by Lewis
Carroll:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
These lines are grammatical in the linguistic sense that they obey the word
order and other constraints of English. Such nonsense poetry is amusing precisely because the sentences comply with syntactic rules and sound like good
English. Ungrammatical strings of nonsense words are not entertaining:
*Toves slithy the and brillig ’twas
wabe the in gimble and gyre did
Grammaticality also does not depend on the truth of sentences. If it did, lying
would be impossible. Nor does it depend on whether real objects are being discussed or whether something is possible in the real world. Untrue sentences can
be grammatical, sentences discussing unicorns can be grammatical, and sentences referring to pregnant fathers can be grammatical.
The syntactic rules that permit us to produce, understand, and make grammaticality judgments are unconscious rules. The grammar is a mental grammar,
different from the prescriptive grammar rules that we are taught in school. We
develop the mental rules of grammar long before we attend school, as we shall
see in chapter 7.
Sentence Structure
I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming
sentences.
GERTRUDE STEIN, “Poetry and Grammar,” 1935
Suppose we wanted to write a template that described the structure of an English
sentence, and more specifically, a template that gave the correct word order for
English. We might come up with something like the following:
Det—N—V—Det—N
This template says that a determiner (an article) is followed by a noun, which is
followed by a verb, and so on. It would describe English sentences such as the
following:
The child found a puppy.
The professor wrote a book.
That runner won the race.
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The implication of such a template would be that sentences are strings of
words belonging to particular grammatical categories (“parts of speech”) with
no internal organization. We know, however, that such “flat” structures are
incorrect. As noted earlier, sentences have a hierarchical organization; that is,
the words are grouped into natural units. The words in the sentence
The child found a puppy.
may be grouped into [the child] and [found a puppy], corresponding to the subject and predicate of the sentence. A further division gives [the child] and then
[[found] [a puppy]], and finally the individual words: [[the] [child]] [[found] [[a]
[puppy]]]. It’s sometimes easier to see the parts and subparts of the sentence in
a tree diagram:
root
the
child
found
a
puppy
The “tree” is upside down with its “root” encompassing the entire sentence,
“The child found a puppy,” and its “leaves” being the individual words, the,
child, found, a, puppy. The tree conveys the same information as the nested
square brackets. The hierarchical organization of the tree reflects the groupings
and subgroupings of the words of the sentence.
The tree diagram shows, among other things, that the phrase found a puppy
divides naturally into two branches, one for the verb found and the other for
the direct object a puppy. A different division, say, found a and puppy, is
unnatural.
Constituents and Constituency Tests
Parts is parts.
WENDY’S COMMERCIAL, 2006
The natural groupings or parts of a sentence are called constituents. Various
linguistic tests reveal the constituents of a sentence. The first test is the “stand
alone” test. If a group of words can stand alone, they form a constituent. For
example, the set of words that can be used to answer a question is a constituent.
So in answer to the question “What did you find?” a speaker might answer a
puppy, but not found a. A puppy can stand alone while found a cannot.
The second test is “replacement by a pronoun.” Pronouns can substitute for
natural groups. In answer to the question “Where did you find a puppy?” a
speaker can say, “I found him in the park.” Words such as do can also take the
place of the entire predicate found a puppy, as in “John found a puppy and Bill
Sentence Structure
did too.” If a group of words can be replaced by a pronoun or a word like do, it
forms a constituent.
A third test of constituency is the “move as a unit” test. If a group of words
can be moved, they form a constituent. For example, if we compare the following sentences to the sentence “The child found a puppy,” we see that certain
elements have moved:
It was a puppy that the child found.
A puppy was found by the child.
In the first example, the constituent a puppy has moved from its position following found; in the second example, the positions of a puppy and the child have
been changed. In all such rearrangements the constituents a puppy and the child
remain intact. Found a does not remain intact, because it is not a constituent.
In the sentence “The child found a puppy,” the natural groupings or constituents are the subject the child, the predicate found a puppy, and the direct object
a puppy.
Some sentences have a prepositional phrase in the predicate. Consider
The puppy played in the garden.
We can use our tests to show that in the garden is also a constituent, as
follows:
Where did the puppy play? In the garden (stand alone)
The puppy played there. (replacement by a pronoun-like word)
In the garden is where the puppy played. (move as a unit)
It was in the garden that the puppy played.
As before, our knowledge of the constituent structure of a sentence may be
graphically represented by a tree diagram. The tree diagram for the sentence
“The puppy played in the garden” is as follows:
the
puppy played
in
the
garden
In addition to the syntactic tests just described, experimental evidence has
shown that speakers do not represent sentences as strings of words but rather
in terms of constituents. In these experiments, subjects listen to sentences that
have clicking noises inserted into them at random points. In some cases the click
occurs at a constituent boundary, and in other sentences the click is inserted
in the middle of a constituent. The subjects are then asked to report where the
click occurred. There were two important results: (1) Subjects noticed the click
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
and recalled its location best when it occurred at a major constituent boundary (e.g., between the subject and predicate); and (2) clicks that occurred inside
the constituent were reported to have occurred between constituents. In other
words, subjects displaced the clicks and put them at constituent boundaries.
These results show that speakers perceive sentences in chunks corresponding to
grammatical constituents.
Every sentence in a language is associated with one or more constituent structures. If a sentence has more than one constituent structure, it is ambiguous,
and each tree will correspond to one of the possible meanings. For example,
the sentence “I bought an antique desk suitable for a lady with thick legs and
large drawers” has two phrase structure trees associated with it. In one structure the phrase [a lady with thick legs and large drawers] forms a constituent.
For example, it could stand alone in answer to the question “Who did you buy
an antique desk for?” In its second meaning, the phrase with thick legs and large
drawers modifies the phrase a desk for a lady, and thus the structure is [[a desk
for a lady][with thick legs and large drawers]].
Syntactic Categories
. ScienceCartoonsPlus.com.
Each grouping in the tree diagrams of “The child found a puppy” is a member
of a large family of similar expressions. For example, the child belongs to a
Sentence Structure
family that includes the police officer, your neighbor, this yellow cat, he, John,
and countless others. We can substitute any member of this family for the child
without affecting the grammaticality of the sentence, although the meaning of
course would change.
A police officer found a puppy.
Your neighbor found a puppy.
This yellow cat found a puppy.
A family of expressions that can substitute for one another without loss of
grammaticality is called a syntactic category.
The child, a police officer, John, and so on belong to the syntactic category
noun phrase (NP), one of several syntactic categories in English and every other
language in the world. NPs may function as the subject or as an object in a sentence. NPs often contain a determiner (like a or the) and a noun, but they may
also consist of a proper name, a pronoun, a noun without a determiner, or even
a clause or a sentence. Even though a proper noun like John and pronouns such
as he and him are single words, they are technically NPs, because they pattern
like NPs in being able to fill a subject or object or other NP slots.
John found the puppy.
He found the puppy.
Boys love puppies.
The puppy loved him.
The puppy loved John.
NPs can be more complex as illustrated by the sentence:
The girl that Professor Snape loved married the man of her dreams.
The NP subject of this sentence is the girl that Professor Snape loved, and the
NP object is the man of her dreams.
Syntactic categories are part of a speaker’s knowledge of syntax. That is,
speakers of English know that only items (a), (b), (e), (f), and (g) in the following
list are NPs even if they have never heard the term noun phrase before.
1.
(a) a bird
(b) the red banjo
(c) have a nice day
(d) with a balloon
(e) the woman who was laughing
(f) it
(g) John
(h) went
You can test this claim by inserting each expression into three contexts: Who
found _________, _________ was seen by everyone, and What/who I heard was
_________. For example, *Who found with a balloon is ungrammatical, as is
*Have a nice day was seen by everyone, as opposed to Who found it? or John
was seen by everyone. Only NPs fit into these contexts because only NPs can
function as subjects and objects.
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
There are other syntactic categories. The expression found a puppy is a verb
phrase (VP). A verb phrase always contains a verb (V), and it may contain other
categories, such as a noun phrase or prepositional phrase (PP), which is a preposition followed by an NP, such as in the park, on the roof, with a balloon. In (2) the
VPs are those phrases that can complete the sentence “The child __________ .”
2.
(a) saw a clown
(b) a bird
(c) slept
(d) smart
(e) ate the cake
(f) found the cake in the cupboard
(g) realized that the earth was round
Inserting (a), (c), (e), (f), and (g) will produce grammatical sentences, whereas the
insertion of (b) or (d) would result in an ungrammatical sentence. Thus, (a), (c),
(e), (f), and (g) are verb phrases.
Lexical and Functional Categories
There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome.
MARK TWAIN, “The Awful German Language,” in A Tramp Abroad, 1880
Syntactic categories include both phrasal categories such as NP, VP, AdjP (adjective phrase), PP (prepositional phrase), and AdvP (adverbial phrase), as well as
lexical categories such as noun (N), verb (V), preposition (P), adjective (Adj),
and adverb (Adv). Each lexical category has a corresponding phrasal category.
Following is a list of lexical categories with some examples of each type:
Lexical categories
Noun (N)
Verb (V)
Preposition (P)
Adjective (Adj)
Adverb (Adv)
puppy, boy, soup, happiness, fork, kiss, pillow, cake,
cupboard
find, run, sleep, throw, realize, see, try, want, believe
up, down, across, into, from, by, with
red, big, candid, hopeless, fair, idiotic, lucky
again, carefully, luckily, never, very, fairly
Many of these categories may already be familiar to you. As mentioned earlier, some of them are traditionally referred to as parts of speech. Other categories may be less familiar, for example, the category determiner (Det), which
includes the articles a and the, as well as demonstratives such as this, that, these,
and those, and “counting words” such as each and every. Another less familiar
category is auxiliary (Aux), which includes the verbs have, had, be, was, and
were, and the modals may, might, can, could, must, shall, should, will, and
would. Aux and Det are functional categories, so called because their members
have a grammatical function rather than a descriptive meaning. For example,
determiners specify whether a noun is indefinite or definite (a boy versus the
Sentence Structure
boy), or the proximity of the person or object to the context (this boy versus that
boy). Auxiliaries provide the verb with a time frame, whether ongoing (John is
dancing), completed in the past (John has danced), or occurring in the future
(John will dance). Auxiliaries may also express notions such as possibility (John
may dance), necessity (John must dance), ability (John can dance), and so on.
Lexical categories typically have particular kinds of meanings associated with
them. For example, verbs usually refer to actions, events, and states (kick, marry,
love); adjectives to qualities or properties (lucky, old); common nouns to general
entities (dog, elephant, house); and proper nouns to particular individuals (Noam
Chomsky) or places (Dodger Stadium) or other things that people give names to,
such as commercial products (Coca-Cola, Viagra). But the relationship between
grammatical categories and meaning is more complex than these few examples
suggest. For example, some nouns refer to events (marriage and destruction)
and others to states (happiness, loneliness). We can use abstract nouns such as
honor and beauty, rather than adjectives, to refer to properties and qualities. In
the sentence “Seeing is believing,” seeing and believing are nouns but are not
entities. Prepositions are usually used to express relationships between two entities involving a location (e.g., the boy is in the room, the cat is under the bed),
but this is not always the case; the prepositions of, by, about, and with are not
locational. Because of the difficulties involved in specifying the precise meaning
of lexical categories, we do not usually define categories in terms of their meanings, but rather on the basis of their syntactic distribution (where they occur in
a sentence) and morphological characteristics. For example, we define a noun
as a word that can occur with a determiner (the boy) and that can take a plural
marker (boys), among other properties.
All languages have syntactic categories such as N, V, and NP. Speakers know
the syntactic categories of their language, even if they do not know the technical terms. Our knowledge of the syntactic classes is revealed when we substitute
equivalent phrases, as we just did in examples (1) and (2), and when we use the
various syntactic tests that we have discussed.
Phrase Structure Trees and Rules
Who climbs the Grammar-Tree distinctly knows
Where Noun and Verb and Participle grows.
JOHN DRYDEN, “The Sixth Satyr of Juvenal,” 1693
Now that you know something about constituent structure and grammatical categories, you are ready to learn how the sentences of a language are constructed.
We will begin by building trees for simple sentences and then proceed to more
complex structures. The trees that we will build here are more detailed than
those we saw in the previous sections, because the branches of the tree will have
category labels identifying each constituent. In this section we will also introduce the syntactic rules that generate (a technical term for describe or specify)
the different kinds of structures.
The following tree diagram provides labels for each of the constituents of the
sentence “The child found a puppy.” These labels show that the entire sentence
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
belongs to the syntactic category of S (because the S-node encompasses all the
words). It also reveals that the child and a puppy belong to the category NP, that
is, they are noun phrases, and that found a puppy belongs to the category VP
or is a verb phrase, consisting of a verb and an NP. It also reveals the syntactic
category of each of the words in the sentence.
S
NP
2
2
Det
g
The
N
g
child
VP
2
V
g
NP
2
found Det
g
a
N
g
puppy
A tree diagram with syntactic category information is called a phrase structure tree or a constituent structure tree. This tree shows that a sentence is both a
linear string of words and a hierarchical structure with phrases nested in phrases.
Phrase structure trees (PS trees, for short) are explicit graphic representations of
a speaker’s knowledge of the structure of the sentences of his language.
PS trees represent three aspects of a speaker’s syntactic knowledge:
1.
2.
3.
The linear order of the words in the sentence
The identification of the syntactic categories of words and groups of words
The hierarchical structure of the syntactic categories (e.g., an S is composed of an NP followed by a VP, a VP is composed of a V that may be followed by an NP, and so on)
In chapter 1 we discussed the fact that the syntactic category of each word is
listed in our mental dictionaries. We now see how this information is used by
the syntax of the language. Words appear in trees under labels that correspond
to their syntactic category. Nouns are under N, determiners under Det, verbs
under V, and so on.
The larger syntactic categories, such as VP, consist of all the syntactic categories and words below that point, or node, in the tree. The VP in the PS tree
above consists of syntactic category nodes V and NP and the words found, a, and
puppy. Because a puppy can be traced up the tree to the node NP, this constituent is a noun phrase. Because found and a puppy can be traced up to the node
VP, this constituent is a verb phrase. The PS tree reflects the speaker’s intuitions
about the natural groupings of words in a sentence. In discussing trees, every
higher node is said to dominate all the categories beneath it. S dominates every
node. A node is said to immediately dominate the categories one level below it.
VP immediately dominates V and NP, the categories of which it is composed.
Categories that are immediately dominated by the same node are sisters. V and
NP are sisters in the phrase structure tree of “the child found a puppy.”
Sentence Structure
A PS tree is a formal device for representing the speaker’s knowledge of the
structure of sentences in his language, as revealed by our linguistic intuitions.
When we speak, we are not aware that we are producing sentences with such
structures, but controlled experiments, such as the click experiments described
earlier, show that we use them in speech production and comprehension. We
will discuss these experiments further in chapter 8.
The information represented in a PS tree can also be represented by another
formal device: phrase structure (PS) rules. PS rules capture the knowledge that
speakers have about the possible structures of a language. Just as a speaker cannot have an infinite list of sentences in her head, so she cannot have an infinite
set of PS trees in her head. Rather, a speaker’s knowledge of the permissible and
impermissible structures must exist as a finite set of rules that generate a tree for
any sentence in the language. To express the structure given above, we need the
following PS rules:
1.
2.
3.
S
NP
VP
→
→
→
NP VP
Det N
V NP
Phrase structure rules specify the well-formed structures of a language precisely and concisely. They express the regularities of the language and make
explicit a speaker’s knowledge of the order of words and the grouping of words
into syntactic categories. For example, in English an NP may contain a determiner followed by a noun. This is represented by rule 2. This rule conveys two
facts:
A noun phrase can contain a determiner followed by a noun in that order.
A determiner followed by a noun is a noun phrase.
You can think of PS rules as templates that a tree must match to be grammatical. To the left of the arrow is the dominating category, in this case NP, and the
categories that it immediately dominates—that comprise it—appear on the right
side, in this case Det and N. The right side of the arrow also shows the linear
order of these components. Thus, one subtree for the English NP looks like this:
NP
2
Det
N
Rule 1 says that a sentence (S) contains (immediately dominates) an NP and
a VP in that order. Rule 3 says that a verb phrase consists of a verb (V) followed
by an NP. These rules are general statements and do not refer to any specific VP,
V, or NP. The subtrees represented by rules 1 and 3 are as follows:
S
2
NP
VP
VP
2
V
NP
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
A VP need not contain an NP object, however. It may include a verb alone, as in
the following sentences:
The woman laughed.
The man danced.
The horse galloped.
These sentences have the structure:
S
2
NP
VP
g
V
Thus a tree must have a VP that immediately dominates V, as specified by
rule 4, which is therefore added to the grammar:
4.
VP
→
V
The following sentences contain prepositional phrases following the verb:
The puppy played in the garden.
The boat sailed up the river.
A girl laughed at the monkey.
The sheepdog rolled in the mud.
The PS tree for such sentences is
S
NP
2
Det
g
The
VP
2
N
V
PP
2
g
g
puppy played P
NP
g
2
in Det
N
g
the
g
garden
To permit structures of this type, we need two additional PS rules, as in 5
and 6.
5.
6.
VP →
PP →
V PP
P NP
Another option open to the VP is to contain or embed a sentence. For example, the sentence “The professor said that the student passed the exam” contains
Sentence Structure
the sentence “the student passed the exam.” Preceding the embedded sentence
is the word that, which is a complementizer (C). C is a functional category, like
Aux and Det. Here is the structure of such sentence types:
S
NP
2
2
Det
g
The
VP
2
N
V
g
g
professor said
CP
2
C
g
that
NP
S
2
2
Det
g
the
N
g
student
VP
2
V
NP
g
2
passed Det
N
g
g
the
exam
To allow such embedded sentences, we need to add these two new rules to our
set of phrase structure rules.
7.
8.
VP → V CP
CP → C S
CP stands for complementizer phrase. Rule 8 says that CP contains a complementizer such as that followed by the embedded sentence. Other complementizers are if and whether in sentences like
I don’t know whether I should talk about this.
The teacher asked if the students understood the syntax lesson.
that have structures similar to the one above.
Here are the PS rules we have discussed so far. A few other rules will be considered later.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
S
NP
VP
VP
VP
PP
VP
CP
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
NP VP
Det N
V NP
V
V PP
P NP
V CP
CS
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
Some Conventions for Building Phrase Structure Trees
Everyone who is master of the language he speaks . . . may form new . . . phrases, provided
they coincide with the genius of the language.
JOHANN DAVID MICHAELIS, Dissertation, 1769
One can use the phrase structure rules as a guide for building trees that follow the structural constraints of the language. In so doing, certain conventions
are followed. The S occurs at the top or “root” of the tree (it’s upside down).
Another convention specifies how the rules are applied: First, find the rule with
S on the left side of the arrow, and put the categories on the right side below the
S, as shown here:
S
2
VP
NP
Continue by matching any syntactic category at the bottom of the partially constructed tree to a category on the left side of a rule, then expand the tree with the
categories on the right side. For example, we may expand the tree by applying
the NP rule to produce:
S
2
NP
2
VP
N
Det
The categories at the bottom are Det, N, and VP, but only VP occurs to the left
of an arrow in the set of rules and so needs to be expanded using one of the VP
rules. Any one of the VP rules will work. The order in which the rules appear in
the list of rules is irrelevant. (We could have begun by expanding the VP rather
than the NP.) Suppose we use rule 5 next. Then the tree has grown to look like
this:
S
VP
NP
Det
N
V
PP
Convention dictates that we continue in this way until none of the categories
at the bottom of the tree appears on the left side of any rule (i.e., no phrasal categories may remain unexpanded). The PP must expand into a P and an NP (rule
6), and the NP into a Det and an N. We can use a rule as many times as it can
apply. In this tree, we used the NP rule twice. After we have applied all the rules
that can apply, the tree looks like this:
Sentence Structure
S
NP
2
Det
N
VP
2
V
PP
2
NP
P
2
Det
N
By following these conventions, we generate only trees specified by the PS
rules, and hence only trees that conform to the syntax of the language. By implication, any tree not so specified will be ungrammatical, that is, not permitted by
the syntax. At any point during the construction of a tree, any rule may be used
as long as its left-side category occurs somewhere at the bottom of the tree. By
choosing different VP rules, we could specify different structures corresponding
to sentences such as:
The boys left. (VP → V)
The wind blew the kite. (VP → V NP)
The senator hopes that the bill passes. (VP → V CP)
Because the number of possible sentences in every language is infinite, there
are also an infinite number of trees. However, all trees are built out of the finite
set of substructures allowed by the grammar of the language, and these substructures are specified by the finite set of phrase structure rules.
The Infinity of Language: Recursive Rules
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
JONATHAN SWIFT, “On Poetry, a Rhapsody,” 1733
We noted at the beginning of the chapter that the number of sentences in a language is infinite and that languages have various means of creating longer and
longer sentences, such as adding an adjective or a prepositional phrase. Even
children know how to produce and understand very long sentences and know
how to make them even longer, as illustrated by the children’s rhyme about the
house that Jack built.
This is the farmer sowing the corn,
that kept the cock that crowed in the morn,
that waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
that married the man all tattered and torn,
that kissed the maiden all forlorn,
that milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
that tossed the dog,
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
that worried the cat,
that killed the rat,
that ate the malt,
that lay in the house that Jack built.
The child begins the rhyme with This is the house that Jack built, continues by
lengthening it to This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built, and so on.
You can add any of the following to the beginning of the rhyme and still have
a grammatical sentence:
I think that . . .
What is the name of the unicorn that noticed that . . .
Ask someone if . . .
Do you know whether . . .
Once we acknowledge the unboundedness of sentences, we need a formal
device to capture that crucial aspect of speakers’ syntactic knowledge. It is no
longer possible to specify each legal structure; there are infinitely many.
To see how this works, let us first look at the case of multiple prepositional
phrases such as [The girl walked [down the street] [over the hill] [through the
woods] . . .]. VP substructures currently allow only one PP per sentence (VP →
V PP—rule 5). We can rectify this problem by revising rule 5:
5.
VP
→
VP PP
Rule 5 is different from the previous rules because it repeats its own category
(VP) inside itself. This is an instance of a recursive rule. Recursive rules are of
critical importance because they allow the grammar to generate an infinite set
of sentences. Reapplying rule 5 shows how the syntax permits structures with
multiple PPs, such as in the sentence “The girl walked down the street with a
gun toward the bank.”
S
NP
VP
2
Det
g
the
N
g
girl
VP
g
VP
VP
5
3
2
PP
2
PP
2
P
g
NP
P
g
toward
2
V
P
NP with Det
g
g
2
g
walked down Det
N
a
g
g
the
street
PP
2
N
g
gun
NP
2
Det
g
the
N
g
bank
Sentence Structure
In this structure the VP rule 5 has applied three times and so there are three PPs:
[down the street] [with a gun] [toward the bank]. It is easy to see that the rule
could have applied four or more times, for example by adding a PP like for no
good purpose.
NPs can also contain PPs recursively. An example of this is shown by the
phrase the man with the telescope in a box.
NP
NP
2
2
Det
g
the
N
g
man
PP
2
P
g
with
NP
NP
2
2
Det
N
g
g
the telescope
PP
2
P
g
in
NP
2
Det
g
a
N
g
box
To show that speakers permit recursive NP structures of this sort, we need to
include the following PS rule, which is like the recursive VP rule 5.
9.
NP →
NP PP
The PS rules define the allowable structures of the language, and in so doing
make predictions about structures that we may not have considered when formulating each rule individually. These predictions can be tested, and if they are
not validated, the rules must be reformulated because they must generate all
and only the allowable structures. For example, rule 7 (VP → V CP) in combination with rules 8 (CP → C S) and 1 (S → NP VP) form a recursive set. (The
recursiveness comes from the fact that S and VP occur on both the left and right
side of the rules.) Those rules allow S to contain VP, which in turn contains CP,
which in turn contains S, which in turn again contains VP, and so on, potentially without end. These rules, formulated for different purposes, correctly predict the limitlessness of language in which sentences are embedded inside larger
sentences, such as The children hope that the teacher knows that the principal
said that the school closes for the day as illustrated on the following page.
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
S
3
NP
2
Det
g
the
VP
2
N
V
g
children
hope
CP
m
2
C
S
g
3
that NP
VP
2
Det
g
the
N
g
teacher
V
2
CP
knows
1
1
a m
1
2
S
C
3
g
that NP
VP
2
Det
N
g
g
the principal
V
2
CP
said
2
S
1
1
a m
1
C
g
that
3
NP
2
Det
g
the
N
g
school
VP
2
V
PP
g
2
closes P
NP
g
2
for Det
N
g
the
g
day
Sentence Structure
Recursive Adjectives and Possessives
© The New Yorker Collection 2003 William Haefeli from cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.
Now we consider the case of multiple adjectives, illustrated at the beginning of
the chapter with sentences such as “The kindhearted, intelligent, handsome boy
had many girlfriends.” In English, adjectives occur before the noun. As a first
approximation we might follow the system we have adopted thus far and introduce a recursive NP rule with a prenominal adjective:
NP →
Adj NP
Repeated application of this rule would generate trees with multiple adjective
positions, as desired.
NP
NP
Adj
NP
Adj
NP
Adj
But there is something wrong in this tree, which is made apparent when we
expand the lowest NP. The adjective can appear before the determiner, and this
is not a possible word order in English NPs.
NP
Adj
g
handsome
NP
Det
g
the
NOT POSSIBLE!
N
g
boy
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
The problem is that although determiners and adjectives are both modifiers
of the noun, they have a different status. First, an NP will never have more than
one determiner in it, while it may contain many adjectives. Also, an adjective
directly modifies the noun, while a determiner modifies the whole adjective(s) +
noun complex. The expression “the big dog” refers to some specific dog that is
big, and not just some dog of any size. In general, modification occurs between
sisters. If the adjective modifies the noun, then it is sister to the noun. If the
determiner modifies the adjective + noun complex, then the determiner is sister
to this complex. We can represent these two sisterhood relations by introducing an additional level of structure between NP and N. We refer to this level as
N-bar (written as N').
NP
Det
g
the
2
N'
2
Adj
g
handsome
N
g
boy
This structure provides the desired sisterhood relations. The adjective handsome
is sister to the noun boy, which it therefore modifies, and the determiner is sister
to the N' handsome boy. We must revise our NP rules to reflect this new structure, and add two rules for N'. Not all NPs have adjectives, of course. This is
reflected in the second N' rule in which N' dominates only N.
NP →
N' →
N' →
Det N' (revised version of NP → Det N)
Adj N'
N
Let us now see how these revised rules generate NPs with multiple (potentially infinitely many) adjectives.
Thus far all the NPs we have looked at are common nouns with a simple definite or indefinite determiner (e.g., the cat, a boy), but NPs can consist of a simple
pronoun (e.g., he, she, we, they) or a proper name (e.g., Robert, California, Prozac). To reflect determiner-less NP structures, we will need the rule
NP →
N'
But that’s not all. We have possessive noun phrases such as Melissa’s garden,
the girl’s shoes, and the man with the telescope’s hat. In these structures the possessor NP (e.g., Melissa’s, the girl’s, etc.) functions as a determiner in that it further specifies its sister noun. The ’s is the phonological realization of the abstract
element poss. The structures are illustrated in each of the following trees.
Sentence Structure
NP
NP
Det
N'
Det
NP
poss
N
Melissa
’s
garden
N'
poss
NP
Det
N'
the
N
girl
N
shoes
’s
NP
5
N'
Det
5
NP
5
N
PP
NP
Det
poss
N'
P
N
NP
Det
N'
N
the
man
with
the telescope ’s
hat
To accommodate the possessive structure we need an additional rule:
Det
→ NP poss
This rule forms a recursive set with the NP → Det N' rule. Together these
rules allow an English speaker to have multiple possessives such as The student’s
friend’s cousin’s book.
The embedding of categories within categories is common to all languages.
Our brain capacity is finite, able to store only a finite number of categories and
rules for their combination. Yet this finite system places an infinite set of sentences at our disposal.
This linguistic property also illustrates the difference between competence
and performance, discussed in chapter 6. All speakers of English (and other languages) have as part of their linguistic competence—their mental grammars—
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the ability to embed phrases and sentences within each other ad infinitum. However, as the structures grow longer, they become increasingly more difficult to
produce and understand. This could be due to short-term memory limitations,
muscular fatigue, breathlessness, boredom, or any number of performance factors. (We will discuss performance factors more fully in chapter 8.) Nevertheless, these very long sentences would be well-formed according to the rules of
the grammar.
Heads and Complements
“Mother Goose & Grimm” . Grimmy, Inc. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
Phrase structure trees also show relationships among elements in a sentence.
For example, the subject and direct object of the sentence can be structurally
defined. The subject is the NP that is closest to, or immediately dominated by,
the root S. The direct object is the NP that is closest to, or immediately dominated by, VP.
Another kind of relationship is that between the head of a phrase and its
sisters. The head of a phrase is the word whose lexical category defines the type
of phrase: the noun in a noun phrase, the verb in a verb phrase, and so on.
Reviewing the PS rules in the previous section, we see that every VP contains
a verb, which is its head. The VP may also contain other categories, such as an
NP or CP. Those sister categories are complements; they complete the meaning of the phrase. Loosely speaking, the entire phrase refers to whatever the
head verb refers to. For example, the VP find a puppy refers to an event of
“finding.” The NP object in the VP that completes its meaning is a complement.
The underscored CP (complementizer phrase) in the sentence “I thought that the
child found the puppy” is also a complement. (Please do not confuse the terms
complementizer and complement.)
Every phrasal category, then, has a head of its same syntactic type. NPs are
headed by nouns, PPs are headed by prepositions, CPs by complementizers, and
so on; and every phrasal head can have a complement, which provides further
information about the head. In the sentence “The death of Lincoln shocked the
nation,” the PP of Lincoln is the complement to the head noun death. Other
examples of complements are illustrated in the following examples, with the
head in italics and the complement underlined:
Sentence Structure
an argument over jelly beans (PP complement to noun)
his belief that justice will prevail (CP complement to noun)
happy to be here (infinitive complement to adjective)
about the war in Iraq (NP complement to preposition)
wrote a long letter to his only sister (NP—PP complement to verb)
tell John that his mother is coming to dinner (NP CP complements to verb)
Each of these examples is a phrase (NP, AdjP, PP, VP) that contains a head (N,
Adj, P, V), followed by a complement of varying composition such as CP in the
case of belief, or NP PP in the case of wrote, and so on. The head-complement
relation is universal. All languages have phrases that are headed and that contain complements.
However, the order of the head and complement may differ in different languages. In English, for example, we see that the head comes first, followed by
the complement. In Japanese, complements precede the head, as shown in the
following examples:
Taro-ga
Taro-subject marker
Inu-ga
dog-subject marker
inu-o
dog-object marker
niwa-de
garden-in
asonde
playing
mitsuketa
found
iru
is
(Taro found a dog)
(The dog is playing in the
garden)
In the first sentence, the direct object complement inu-o “dog” precedes the
head verb mitsuketa “found.” In the second, the PP complement niwa-de “in the
garden” also precedes the head verb phrase. English is a VO language, meaning
that the verb ordinarily precedes its object. Japanese is an OV language, and this
difference is also reflected in the head/complement word order.
Selection
Whether a verb takes a complement or not depends on the properties of the
verb. For example, the verb find is a transitive verb. A transitive verb requires an
NP complement (direct object), as in The boy found the ball, but not *The boy
found, or *The boy found in the house. Some verbs like eat are optionally transitive. John ate and John ate a sandwich are both grammatical.
Verbs select different kinds of complements. For example, verbs like put and
give take both an NP and a PP complement, but cannot occur with either alone:
Sam put the milk in the refrigerator.
*Sam put the milk.
Robert gave the film to his client.
*Robert gave to his client.
Sleep is an intransitive verb; it cannot take an NP complement.
Michael slept.
*Michael slept a fish.
Some verbs, such as think, select a sentence complement, as in “I think that
Sam won the race.” Other verbs, like tell, select an NP and a sentence, as in “I
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told Sam that Michael was on his bicycle”; yet other verbs like feel select either
an AdjP or a sentence complement. (Complements are italicized.)
Paul felt strong as an ox.
He feels that he can win.
As we will discuss later, sentences that are complements must often be preceded
by a complementizer that.
Other categories besides verbs also select their complements. For example,
the noun belief selects either a PP or a CP, while the noun sympathy selects a PP,
but not a CP, as shown by the following examples:
the belief in freedom of speech
the belief that freedom of speech is a basic right
their sympathy for the victims
*their sympathy that the victims are so poor
Adjectives can also have complements. For example, the adjectives tired and
proud select PPs:
tired of stale sandwiches
proud of her children
With noun selection, the complement is often optional. Thus sentences like
“He respected their belief,” “We appreciated their sympathy,” “Elimelech was
tired,” and “All the mothers were proud” are syntactically well-formed with a
meaning that might be conveyed by an explicit complement understood from
context. Verb selection is often not optional, however, so that *He put the milk
is ungrammatical even if it is clear from context where the milk was put.
The information about the complement types selected by particular verbs and
other lexical items is called C-selection or subcategorization, and is included in
the lexical entry of the item in our mental lexicon. (Here C stands for “categorial” and is not to be confused with the C that stands for “complementizer”—we
apologize for the “clash” of symbols, but that’s what it’s like in the linguistic
literature.)
Verbs also include in their lexical entry a specification of certain intrinsic
semantic properties of their subjects and complements, just as they select for
syntactic categories. This kind of selection is called S-selection (S for semantic).
For example, the verb murder requires its subject and object to be human, while
the verb drink requires its subject to be animate and its object liquid. Verbs such
as like, hate, and so on select animate subjects. The following sentences violate
S-selection and can only be used in a metaphorical sense. (We will use the symbol “!” to indicate a semantic anomaly.)
!The rock murdered the man.
!The beer drank the student.
!The tree liked the boy.
The famous sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, discussed earlier in
this chapter, is anomalous because (among other things) S-selection is violated
Sentence Structure
(e.g., the verb sleep requires an animate subject). In chapter 3 we will discuss
the semantic relationships between a verb and its subject and objects in far more
detail.
The well-formedness of a phrase depends then on at least two factors: whether
the phrase conforms to the structural constraints of the language as expressed in
the PS rules, and whether it obeys the selectional requirements of the head, both
syntactic (C-selection) and semantic (S-selection).
What Heads the Sentence
Might, could, would—they are contemptible auxiliaries.
GEORGE ELIOT (MARY ANN EVANS), Middlemarch, 1872
We said earlier that all phrases have heads. One category that we have not yet
discussed in this regard is sentence (S). For uniformity’s sake, we want all the
categories to be headed, but what would the head of S be? To answer this question, let us consider sentences such as the following:
Sam will kick the soccer ball.
Sam has kicked the soccer ball.
Sam is kicking the soccer ball.
Sam may kick the soccer ball.
As noted earlier, words like will, has, is, and may are auxiliary verbs, belonging to the category Aux, which also includes modals such as might, could, would,
can, and several others. They occur in structures such as the following one.
S
NP
2
@
The boy
VP
2
Aux
g
is
may
has
VP
@
eating
eat
eaten
(From now on we will adopt the convention of using a triangle under a node
when the content of a category is not crucial to the point under discussion.)
Auxiliary verbs specify a time frame for the event (or state) described by the
verb, whether it will take place in the future, already took place in the past, or
is taking place now. A modal such as may contains “possibility” as part of its
meaning, and says it is possible that the event will occur at some future time.
The category Aux is a natural category to head S. Just as the VP is about the
situation described by the verb—eat ice cream is about “eating”—so a sentence
is about a situation or state of affairs that occurs at some point in time.
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
The parallel with other categories extends further. In the previous PS tree, VP
is the complement to Aux. The selectional relationship between Aux and VP is
demonstrated by the fact that particular auxiliaries go with particular kinds of
VPs. For example, the auxiliary be takes a progressive (-ing) form of the verb,
The boy is dancing.
while the auxiliary have selects a past participle (-en) form of the verb,
The girl has eaten.
and the modals select the infinitival form of the verb (no affixes),
The child must sleep
The boy may eat.
To have a uniform notation, many linguists use the symbols T (= tense) and
TP (= tense phrase) instead of Aux and S. Furthermore, just as the NP required
the intermediate N-bar (N') category, the TP also has the intermediate T-bar
(T') category, as in the phrase structure tree below.
TP
NP
2
@
T'
2
T
g
VP
be
have
Modal
Indeed, many linguists assume that all XPs, where XP stands for any of NP,
PP, VP, TP, AdjP, or CP, have three levels of structure. This is referred to as
X-bar theory. The basic three-level X-bar schema is as follows:
XP
2
specifier
X'
2
X (head)
complement
The first level is the XP itself. The second level consists of a specifier, which
functions as a modifier (and which is generally an optional constituent), and an
X' (i.e., “X-bar”). For example, an NP specifier is a determiner; a VP specifier
is an adverb such as never or often; an AdjP specifier is a degree word such as
very or quite. The third level is an expansion of X' and consists of a head X
and a complement, which may itself be a phrasal category, thus giving rise to
recursion. X-bar structure is thought to be universal, occurring in all the world’s
Sentence Structure
languages, though the order of the elements inside XP and X' may be reversed,
as we saw in Japanese.
We will not use X-bar conventions in our description of syntax except on the
few occasions where the notation provides an insight into the syntax of the language. For sentences we will generally use the more intuitive symbols S and Aux
instead of TP and T, but you should think of Aux and S as having the same relationship to each other as V and VP, N and NP, and so on. To achieve this more
straightforward approach, we will also ignore the T' category until it is needed
later on in the description of the syntax of the main verb be.
Without the use of TP, T', and T, we need an additional PS rule to characterize structures containing Aux:
VP
→
Aux VP
Like the other recursive VP rules, this rule will allow multiple Aux positions.
VP
Aux
2
VP
2
Aux
VP
2
Aux
VP
@
This is a desired consequence because English allows sentences with multiple
auxiliaries such as:
The child may be sleeping.
The dog has been barking all night.
The bird must have been flying home.
(modal, be)
(have, be)
(modal, have, be)
The introduction of Aux into the system raises a question. Not all sentences
seem to have auxiliaries. For example, the sentence “Sam kicked the soccer ball”
has no modal, have or be. There is, however, a time reference for this sentence,
namely, the past tense on the verb kicked. In sentences without auxiliaries, the
tense of the sentence is its head. Instead of having a word under the category Aux
(or T), there is a tense specification, present or past, as in the following tree:
S
NP
2
@
Sam
VP
2
Aux
VP
@
g
past kicked the ball
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
The inflection on the verb must match the tense in Aux. For example, if the
tense of the sentence is past, then the verb must have an -ed affix (or must be an
irregular past tense verb such as ate).
Thus, in English, and many other languages, the head of S may contain
only an abstract tense specification and no actual word, as just illustrated. The
actual morpheme, in this case -ed or an irregular past tense form such as went,
is inserted into the tree after all the syntactic rules have applied. Most inflectional morphemes, which depend on elements of syntax, are represented in this
way. Another example is the tense-bearing word do that is inserted into negative
sentences such as John did not go and questions such as Where did John go? In
these sentences did means “past tense.” Later in this chapter we will see how
do-insertion works.
In addition to specifying the time reference of the sentence, Aux specifies the
agreement features of the subject. For example, if the subject is we, Aux contains
the features first-person and plural; if the subject is he or she, Aux contains the
features third-person and singular. So, another function of the syntactic rules is
to use Aux as a “matchmaker” between the subject and the verb. When the subject and the verb bear the same features, Aux makes a match; when they have
incompatible features, Aux cannot make a match and the sentence is ungrammatical. This matchmaker function of syntactic rules is more obvious in languages such as Italian, which have many different agreement morphemes, as
discussed in chapter 1. Consider the Italian sentence for “I buy books.”
S
VP
NP
@
Io
*Io
Present
first person
Present
second person
Aux
VP
@
compro i libri
compri i libri
The verb compro, “buy,” in the first sentence bears the first-person singular
morpheme, -o, which matches the agreement feature in Aux, which in turn
matches the subject Io, “I.” The sentence is therefore grammatical. In the second
sentence, there is a mismatch between the first-person subject and the secondperson features in Aux (and on the verb), and so the sentence is ungrammatical.
Sentence Structure
Structural Ambiguities
The structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic.
JOHN STUART MILL, Inaugural address at St. Andrews, 1867
As mentioned earlier, certain kinds of ambiguous sentences have more than
one phrase structure tree, each corresponding to a different meaning. The sentence The boy saw the man with the telescope is structurally ambiguous. Its two
meanings correspond to the following two phrase structure trees. (For simplicity
we omit Aux in these structures and we return to the non-X-bar notation.)
S
1.
NP
4
2
Det
g
The
N
g
boy
2.
VP
4
VP
PP
2
2
V
NP
P
NP
2
2
g
g
saw Det
N with Det
N
g
g
g
g
the
man
the telescope
S
NP
2
2
Det
g
The
N
g
boy
VP
2
V
g
saw
NP
2
2
Det
g
the
NP
PP
2
N
P
NP
2
g
g
man with Det
N
g
g
the telescope
109
110
CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
One meaning of this sentence is “the boy used a telescope to see the man.”
The first phrase structure tree represents this meaning. The key element is the
position of the PP directly under the VP. Notice that although the PP is under
VP, it is not a complement because phrasal categories don’t take complements
(only heads do), and because it is not selected by the verb. The verb see selects an
NP. In this sentence, the PP has an adverbial function and modifies the verb.
In its other meaning, “the boy saw a man who had a telescope,” the PP with
the telescope occurs under the direct object NP, where it modifies the noun man.
In this second meaning, the complement of the verb see is the entire NP—the
man with the telescope.
The PP in the first structure is generated by the rule
VP
→
VP PP
In the second structure the PP is generated by the rule
NP →
NP PP
Two interpretations are possible because the rules of syntax permit different
structures for the same linear order of words.
Following is the set of PS rules that we have presented so far in the chapter.
The rules have been renumbered.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
S
NP
Det
NP
NP
N'
N'
VP
VP
VP
VP
VP
PP
CP
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
NP VP
Det N'
NP poss
N'
NP PP
Adj N'
N
V
V NP
V CP
Aux VP
VP PP
P NP
CS
This is not the complete set of PS rules for the language. Various structures
in English cannot be generated with these rules, some of which we will talk
about later. But even this mini phrase structure grammar generates an infinite
set of possible sentences because the rules are recursive. These PS rules specify
the word order for English (and other SVO languages, but not for Japanese, say,
Sentence Structure
in which the object comes before the verb). Linear order aside, the hierarchical organization illustrated by these rules is largely true for all languages, as
expressed by X-bar schema.
More Structures
“Shoe” © MacNelly. King Features Syndicate
Many English sentence types are not accounted for by the phrase structure rules
given so far, including:
1.
2.
3.
The dog completely destroyed the house.
The cat and the dog were friends.
The cat is coy.
111
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
The sentence in (1) contains the adverb (Adv) completely. Adverbs are modifiers
that can specify how an event happens (quickly, slowly, completely) or when
it happens (yesterday, tomorrow, often). As modifiers, adverbs are sisters to
phrasal (XP) categories. In sentence (1) the adverb is a sister to VP, as illustrated
in the following structure (we ignore Aux in this structure):
S
VP
NP
@
The dog
Adv
g
completely
VP
@
destroyed the house
Temporal adverbs such as yesterday, today, last week, and manner adverbs
such as quietly, violently, suddenly, carefully, also occur to the right of VP as
follows:
S
VP
NP
@
Adv
@
g
destroyed the house yesterday
The dog
VP
Adverbs also occur as sisters to S (which, recall, is also a phrasal category, TP).
S
Adv
g
probably
S
NP
2
@
the dog
VP
@
has fleas
Sentence Structure
At this point you should be able to write the three PS rules that will account for
the position of these adverbs.1
The “Shoe” cartoon’s joke is based on the fact that curse may take an NP
complement (“cursed at the day”) and/or be modified by a temporal adverbial
phrase (AdvP) (“cursed on the day”), leading to the structural ambiguity:
VP
VP
V
g
cursed
NP
g
the day I was born
V
g
cursed
AdvP
g
the day I was born
Interestingly, I cursed the day I was born the day I was born, with both the NP
and AdvP modifying the verb, is grammatical and meaningful. (See exercise 23b.)
Sentence 2 contains a coordinate structure The cat and the dog. A coordinate
structure results when two constituents of the same category (in this case, two
NPs) are joined with a conjunction such as and or or. The coordinate NP has the
following structure:
NP
NP1
CoordP
Coord
g
and
NP2
Though this may seem counterintuitive, in a coordinate structure the second
member of the coordination (NP2) forms a constituent with the conjunction and.
We can show this by means of the “move as a unit” constituency test. In sentence (5) the words and a CD move together to the end of the sentence, whereas
in (6) the constituent is broken, resulting in ungrammaticality.
4.
5.
6.
Caley bought a book and a CD yesterday.
Caley bought a book yesterday and a CD.
*Caley bought a book and yesterday a CD.
Once again, we encourage you to write the two PS rules that generate this
structure. 2
VP → Adv VP
VP → VP Adv
Answer: NP → NP CoordP, CoordP → Coord NP
2
Answer: S → Adv S
1
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
You can also construct trees for other kinds of coordinate structures, such as
VP or PP coordination, which follow the same pattern.
Michael writes poetry and surfs. (VP and VP)
Sam rode his bicycle to school and to the pool. (PP and PP)
Sentence (3) contains the main verb be followed by an adjective. The structure
of main verb be sentences is best illustrated using T' notation. The main verb be
acts like the modals and the auxiliaries be and have. For example, it is moved to
the beginning of the sentence in questions (Is the cat coy?). For this reason we
assume that the main verb be occurs under T and takes an XP complement. The
XP may be AdjP, as shown in the tree structure for (3):
TP
NP
2
@
the cat
T'
2
T
g
is
AdjP
g
Adj
g
coy
or an NP or PP as would occur in The cat is a feline or The cat is in the tree.
As before we will leave it as an exercise for you to construct the PS rules for
these sentence types and the tree structures they generate.3 (You might try drawing the tree structures; they should look very much like the one above.)
There are also embedded sentence types other than those that we have discussed, for example:
Hilary is waiting for you to sing. (Cf. You sing.)
The host wants the president to leave early. (Cf. The president leaves early.)
The host believes the president to be punctual. (Cf. The president is
punctual.)
Although the detailed structure of these different embedded sentences is beyond
the scope of this introduction, you should note that an embedded sentence may
be an infinitive. An infinitive sentence does not have a tense. The embedded sentences for you to sing, the president to leave early, and the president to be punctual are infinitives. Such verbs as want and believe, among many others, can
take infinitival complements. This information, like other selectional properties,
belongs to the lexical entry of the selecting verb (the higher verb in the tree).
3
Answer: TP → NP T', T' → T XP (where XP = AdjP, PP, NP)
114
Sentence Relatedness
Sentence Relatedness
I put the words down and push them a bit.
EVELYN WAUGH, quoted in The New York Times, April 11, 1966
Another aspect of our syntactic competence is the knowledge that certain sentences are related to one another, such as the following pair:
The boy is sleeping.
Is the boy sleeping?
These sentences describe the same situation. The sentence in the first column
asserts that a particular situation exists, a boy-sleeping situation. Such sentences
are called declarative sentences. The sentence in the second column asks whether
such a boy-sleeping situation holds. Sentences of the second sort are called yesno questions. The only actual difference in meaning between these sentences is
that one asserts a situation and the other asks for confirmation of a situation.
This element of meaning is indicated by the different word orders, which illustrates that two sentences may have a structural difference that corresponds in
a systematic way to a meaning difference. The grammar of the language must
account for this fact.
Transformational Rules
Method consists entirely in properly ordering and arranging the things to which we should
pay attention.
RENÉ DESCARTES, Oeuvres, vol. X, c. 1637
Phrase structure rules account for much of our syntactic knowledge, but they
do not account for the fact that certain sentence types in the language relate
systematically to other sentence types. The standard way of describing these
relationships is to say that the related sentences come from a common underlying structure. Yes-no questions are a case in point, and they bring us back to a
discussion of auxiliaries. Auxiliaries are central to the formation of yes-no questions as well as certain other types of sentences in English. In yes-no questions,
the auxiliary appears in the position preceding the subject. Here are a few more
examples:
The boy is sleeping.
The boy has slept.
The boy can sleep.
The boy will sleep.
Is the boy sleeping?
Has the boy slept?
Can the boy sleep?
Will the boy sleep?
A way to capture the relationship between a declarative and a yes-no question
is to allow the PS rules to generate a structure corresponding to the declarative
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
sentence. Another formal device, called a transformational rule, then moves the
auxiliary before the subject. The rule “Move Aux” is formulated as follows:
Move the highest Aux to adjoin to (the root) S.
That is, Move Aux applies to structures like:
S
NP
VP
@
Aux
etc.
to give structures like:
S (newly created)
S
Aux
NP
VP
etc.
g
The “__” shows the position from which the Aux is moved. For example:
The boy is sleeping.
→
Is the boy __ sleeping?
The rule takes the basic (NP-Aux) structure generated by the phrase structure
rules and derives a second tree (the dash represents the position from which a
constituent has been moved). The Aux is attached to the tree by adjunction.
Adjunction is an operation that copies an existing node (in this case S) and creates a new level to which the moved category (in this case Aux) is appended.
S
NP
2
@
the boy
S
VP
2
Aux
g
is
VP
g
V
g
sleeping
→
Aux
g
is
2
NP
S
2
@
the boy
VP
2
g
116
VP
g
V
g
sleeping
Sentence Relatedness
Yes-no questions are thus generated in two steps.
1.
2.
The phrase structure rules generate a basic structure.
Aux movement applies to produce the derived structure.
The basic structures of sentences, also called deep structures or d-structures,
conform to the phrase structure rules. Variants on the basic sentence structures
are derived via transformations. By generating questions in two steps, we are
claiming that for speakers a relationship exists between a question and its corresponding statement. Intuitively, we know that such sentences are related. The
transformational rule is a formal way of representing this knowledge.
The derived structures—the ones that follow the application of transformational rules—are called surface structures or s-structures. The phonological rules
of the language—the ones that determine pronunciation—apply to s-structures.
If no transformations apply, then d-structure and s-structure are the same. If
transformations apply, then s-structure is the result after all transformations
have had their effect. Many sentence types are accounted for by transformations,
which can alter phrase structure trees by moving, adding, or deleting elements.
Other sentence pairs that are transformationally related are:
active-passive
The cat chased the mouse.
→
The mouse was chased by the cat.
there sentences
There was a man on the roof.
→
A man was on the roof.
PP preposing
The astronomer saw the quasar with the telescope.
telescope, the astronomer saw the quasar.
→
With the
The Structural Dependency of Rules
“Peanuts” © United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
Transformations act on phrase structures without paying attention to the particular words that the structures contain. These rules are said to be structure
dependent. The transformational rule of PP preposing moves any PP as long as
117
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
it is immediately under the VP, as in In the house, the puppy found the ball; or
With the telescope, the boy saw the man; and so on.
Evidence that transformations are structure dependent is provided by the fact
that the sentence With a telescope, the boy saw the man is not ambiguous. It has
only the meaning “the boy used a telescope to see the man,” the meaning corresponding to the first phrase structure on page 109 in which the PP is immediately dominated by the VP. In the structure corresponding to the other meaning,
“boy saw a man who had a telescope,” the PP is in the NP as in the second tree
on page 109. The PP preposing transformation applies to the VP–PP structure
and not to the NP–PP structure.
Another rule of English allows the complementizer that to be omitted when it
precedes an embedded sentence but not a sentence that appears in subject position, as illustrated by these pairs:
I know that you know.
That you know bothers me.
I know you know.
*You know bothers me.
This is a further demonstration that rules are structure dependent.
Agreement rules are also structure dependent. In many languages, including
English, the verb must agree with the subject. The verb is marked with an -s
when the subject is third-person singular.
This guy seems kind of cute.
These guys seem kind of cute.
Now consider these sentences:
The guy we met at the party next door seems kind of cute.
The guys we met at the party next door seem kind of cute.
The verb seem must agree with the subject, guy or guys. Even though there are
various words between the head noun and the verb, the verb always agrees with
the head noun. Moreover, there is no limit to how many words may intervene, or
whether they are singular or plural, as the following sentence illustrates:
The guys (guy) we met at the party next door that lasted until 3 a.m. and
was finally broken up by the cops who were called by the neighbors seem
(seems) kind of cute.
The phrase structure tree of such a sentence explains why this is so.
S
NP
VP
Aux
present
3rd person
singular
The guy
= = = = = =
VP
seems kind of cute
Sentence Relatedness
In the tree, “= = = = = =” represents the intervening structure, which may, in
principle, be indefinitely long and complex. Speakers of English (and all other
languages) know that agreement depends on sentence structure, not the linear
order of words. Agreement is between the subject and the main verb, where
the subject is structurally defined as the NP immediately dominated by S. The
agreement relation is mediated by Aux, which contains the tense and agreement
features that match up the subject and verb. As far as the rule of agreement is
concerned, all other material can be ignored, although in actual performance, if
the distance is too great, the speaker may forget what the head noun was.
The “Peanuts” cartoon also illustrates that agreement takes place between
the head noun—the first occurrence of “refusal”—and the structurally highest
verb in the sentence, which is the final occurrence of “do,” despite the 14 intervening words.
A final illustration of structure dependency is found in the declarativequestion pairs discussed previously. Consider the following sets of sentences:
The boy who is sleeping was dreaming.
Was the boy who is sleeping dreaming?
*Is the boy who sleeping was dreaming?
The boy who can sleep will dream.
Will the boy who can sleep dream?
*Can the boy who sleep will dream?
The ungrammatical sentences show that to form a question, the rule that moves
Aux singles out the auxiliary dominated by the root S, and not simply the first
auxiliary in the sentence. We can see this in the following simplified phrase structure trees. There are two auxiliaries, one in the subject relative clause and the
other in the root clause. The rule affects the auxiliary in the higher main clause.
S
VP
NP
@
the boy who
is sleeping
2
Aux
g
was
→
VP
@
dreaming
S
S
NP
@
the boy who
is sleeping
VP
ro
g
Aux
g
was
VP
@
dreaming
119
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
If the rule picked out the first Aux, we would have the ungrammatical sentence Is the boy who__ sleeping was dreaming. To derive the correct s-structures,
transformations such as Move Aux must refer to phrase structure and not to the
linear order of elements.
Structure dependency is a principle of Universal Grammar, and is found in
all languages. For example, in languages that have subject-verb agreement, the
dependency is between the verb and the head noun, and never some other noun
such as the closest one, as shown in the following examples from Italian, German, Swahili, and English, respectively (the third-person singular agreement
affix in the verb is in boldface and is governed by the boldfaced head noun, not
the underlined noun, even though the latter is nearest the main verb):
La madre con tanti figli lavora molto.
Die Mutter mit den vielen Kindern arbeitet viel.
Mama anao watoto wengi anajitahidi.
The mother with many children works a lot.
Further Syntactic Dependencies
Sentences are organized according to two basic principles: constituent structure
and syntactic dependencies. As we have discussed, constituent structure refers
to the hierarchical organization of the subparts of a sentence, and transformational rules are sensitive to it. The second important property is the dependencies among elements in the sentence. In other words, the presence of a particular
word or morpheme can be contingent on the presence of some other word or
morpheme in a sentence. We have already seen at least two examples of syntactic dependencies. Selection is one kind of dependency. Whether there is a
direct object in a sentence depends on whether the verb is transitive or intransitive. More generally, complements depend on the properties of the head of their
phrase. Agreement is another kind of dependency. The features in Aux (and on
the verb) must match the features of the subject.
Wh Questions
Whom are you? said he, for he had been to night school.
GEORGE ADE, “The Steel Box,” in Bang! Bang!, 1928
The following wh questions illustrate another kind of dependency:
1.
(a) What will Max chase?
(b) Where has Pete put his bone?
(c) Which dog do you think loves balls?
There are several points of interest in these sentences. First, the verb chase in
sentence (a) is transitive, yet there is no direct object following it. There is a gap
Sentence Relatedness
where the direct object should be. The verb put in sentence (b) selects a direct
object and a prepositional phrase, yet there is no PP following his bone. Finally,
the embedded verb loves in sentence (c) bears the third-person -s morpheme,
yet there is no obvious subject to trigger this agreement. If we remove the wh
phrases, the remaining sentences would be ungrammatical.
2.
(a) *will Max chase ___?
(b) *has Pete put his bone ___?
(c) *do you think ___ loves balls?
The grammaticality of a sentence with a gap depends on there being a wh
phrase at the beginning of the sentence. The sentences in (1) are grammatical
because the wh phrase is acting like the object in (a), the prepositional phrase
object in (b), and the embedded subject in (c).
We can explain the dependency between the wh phrase and the missing constituent if we assume that in each case the wh phrase originated in the position
of the gap in a sentence with the corresponding declarative structure:
3.
(a) Max will chase what?
(b) Pete has put his bone where?
(c) You think (that) which dog loves balls?
The wh phrase is then moved to the beginning of the sentence by a transformational rule: Move wh. Because embedded wh phrases (I wonder who Mary
likes) are known to be complementizer phrases (CPs), we may deduce that main
clause questions (Who does Mary like?) are also CPs, with the following structure (recall that C abbreviates “complementizer”):
CP
C
S
The wh phrase moves to the empty C position at the left periphery of the
sentence.
Thus, wh questions are generated in three steps:
1.
2.
3.
The phrase structure rules generate the CP d-structure with the wh phrase
occupying an NP position within the S: direct object in (3a); prepositional
object in (3b); and subject in (3c).
Move Aux adjoins the auxiliary to S.
Move wh moves the wh phrase to C.
The following tree shows the d-structure of the sentence What will Max
chase?
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
CP
C
2
S
2
NP
@
Max
VP
2
Aux
g
will
→
VP
2
V
g
chase
NP
g
what
The s-structure representation of this sentence is:
CP
2
C
S
2
g
What Aux
S
g
2
NP
will
VP
@ ro
VP
2
chase
g
Max
g
122
In question (1c), there is an auxiliary “do.” Unlike the other auxiliaries (e.g.,
can, have, be), do is not part of the d-structure of the question. The d-structure
of the question Which dog did Michael feed? is “Michael fed which dog?”
Because Move Aux is structure dependent (like all rules), it ignores the content
of the category. It will therefore move Aux even when Aux contains only a tense
feature such as past. In this case, another rule called “do support,” inserts do
into the structure to carry the tense:
Sentence Relatedness
CP
C
2
S
2
NP
@
Michael
VP
→
2
Aux
g
past
VP
2
V
g
feed
NP
@
which dog
CP
2
which dog
do
S
2
Aux
g
past
S
2
NP
VP
@ ro
Michael
VP
2
V
g
feed
g
@
g
C
The first tree represents the d-structure to which the Aux and wh movement
rules apply. The second tree shows the output of those transformations and the
insertion of “do.” “Do” combines with past to yield “did.” Rules that convert
inflectional features such as past tense, third-person present tense, and the possessive poss into their proper phonological forms are called spell-out rules.
Unlike the other rules we have seen, which operate inside a phrase or clause,
Move wh can move the wh phrase outside of its own clause. There is no limit to
the distance that a wh phrase can move, as illustrated by the following sentences.
The dashes indicate the position from which the wh phrase has been moved.
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
Who did Helen say the senator wanted to hire ___?
Who did Helen say the senator wanted the congressional representative to
try to hire ___?
Who did Helen say the senator wanted the congressional representative to
try to convince the Speaker of the House to get the Vice President to hire
___?
“Long-distance” dependencies created by wh movement are a fundamental
part of human language. They provide still further evidence that sentences are
not simply strings of words but are supported by a rich scaffolding of phrase
structure trees. These trees express the underlying structure of a sentence as well
as its relation to other sentences in the language, and as always are reflective of
a person’s knowledge of syntax.
UG Principles and Parameters
Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see
of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his Verb in his mouth.
MARK TWAIN, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889
In this chapter we have largely focused on English syntax, but many of the grammatical structures we have described for English also hold in other languages.
This is because Universal Grammar (UG) provides the basic design for all human
languages, and individual languages are simply variations on this basic design.
Imagine a new housing development. All of the houses have the same floor plan,
but the occupants have some choices to make. They can have carpet or hardwood floors, curtains or blinds; they can choose their kitchen cabinets and the
countertops, the bathroom tiles, and so on. This is more or less how the syntax
operates. Languages conform to a basic design, and then there are choice points
or points of variation.
All languages have phrase structure rules that specify the allowable
d-structures. In all languages, phrases consist of heads and complements, and
sentences are headed by Aux (or T), which is specified for information such as
tense, agreement, and modality. However, languages may have different word
orders within the phrases and sentences. The word order differences between
English and Japanese, discussed earlier, illustrate the interaction of general and
language-specific properties. UG specifies the structure of a phrase. It must have
a head and may take one or more complement types (the X-bar schema discussed earlier). However, each language defines for itself the relative order of
these constituents: English is head initial, Japanese is head final. We call the
points of variation parameters.
All languages seem to have movement rules. Move Aux is a version of a more
general rule that exists in languages such as Dutch, in which the auxiliary moves,
if there is one, as in (1), and otherwise the main verb moves, as in (2):
UG Principles and Parameters
1.
2.
Zal Femke fietsen?
will Femke bicycle ride
Leest Meindert veel boeken?
reads Meindert many books
(Will Femke ride her bicycle?)
(Does Meindert read many books?)
In English, main verbs other than be do not move. Instead, English “do” spells
out the stranded tense and agreement features. All languages have expressions
for requesting information about who, when, where, what, and how. Even if the
question words in other languages do not necessarily begin with “wh,” we will
refer to such questions as wh questions. In some languages, such as Japanese and
Swahili, the wh phrase does not move. It remains in its original d-structure position. In Japanese the sentence is marked with a question morpheme, no:
Taro-ga
Taro
nani-o
what
mitsuketa-no?
found
Recall that Japanese word order is SOV, so the wh phrase nani (“what”) is an
object and occurs before the verb.
In Swahili the wh phrase—nani by pure coincidence—also stays in its base
position:
Ulipatia
you gave
nani
who
Kitabu?
a book
However, in all languages with wh movement (i.e., movement of the question
phrase), the question element moves to C (complementizer). The “landing site”
of the moved phrase is determined by UG. Among the wh movement languages,
there is some variation. In the Romance languages, such as Italian, the wh phrase
moves as in English, but when the wh phrase questions the object of a preposition, the preposition must move together with the wh phrase. In English, by contrast, the preposition can be “stranded” (i.e., left behind in its original position):
A chi hai dato il libro?
To whom (did) you give the book?
*Chi hai dato il libro a?
Who(m) did you give the book to?
In some dialects of German, long-distance wh movement leaves a trail of wh
phrases in the C position of the embedded sentence:
Mit
wem
Glaubst
Du
With
whom
think
you
(Whom do you think Hans talks to?)
Mit
with
Wen
willst
Du
Wen
Whom
want
you
whom
(Whom do you want Hans to call?)
Hans
Hans
wem
whom
anruft?
call
Hans
Hans
spricht?
talks
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
In Czech the question phrase “how much” can be moved, leaving behind the
NP it modifies:
Jak
velké Václav koupil
How big
Václav bought
(How big a car did Václav buy?)
auto?
car
Despite these variations, wh movement adheres to certain constraints.
Although wh phrases such as what, who, and which boy can be inserted into
any NP position, and are then free in principle to move to C, there are specific
instances in which wh movement is blocked. For example, a wh phrase cannot
move out of a relative clause like the senator that wanted to hire who, as in (1b).
It also cannot move out of a clause beginning with whether or if, as in (2c) and
(d). (Remember that the position from which the wh phrases have moved is indicated with ___.)
1.
(a) Emily paid a visit to the senator that wants to hire who?
(b) *Who did Emily pay a visit to the senator that wants to hire ___?
2.
(a) Miss Marple asked Sherlock whether Poirot had solved the crime.
(b) Who did Miss Marple ask ___ whether Poirot had solved the crime?
(c) *Who did Miss Marple ask Sherlock whether ___ had solved the crime?
(d) *What did Miss Marple ask Sherlock whether Poirot had solved ___?
The only difference between the grammatical (2b) and the ungrammatical
(2c) and (d) is that in (2b) the wh phrase originates in the higher clause, whereas
in (2c, d) the wh phrase comes from inside the whether clause. This illustrates
that the constraint against movement depends on structure and not on the length
of the sentence.
Some sentences can be very short and still not allow wh movement:
3.
(a) Sam Spade insulted the fat man’s henchman.
(b) Who did Sam Spade insult?
(c) Whose henchman did Sam Spade insult?
(d) *Whose did Sam Spade insult henchman?
4.
(a) John ate bologna and cheese.
(b) John ate bologna with cheese.
(c) *What did John eat bologna and?
(d) What did John eat bologna with?
The sentences in (3) show that a wh phrase cannot be extracted from inside
a possessive NP. In (3b) it is okay to question the whole direct object. In (3c) it
is even okay to question a piece of the possessive NP, providing the entire wh
phrase is moved, but (3d) shows that moving the wh word alone out of the possessive NP is illicit.
Sentence (4a) is a coordinate structure and has approximately the same meaning as (4b), which is not a coordinate structure. In (4c) moving a wh phrase out
Sign Language Syntax
of the coordinate structure results in ungrammaticality, whereas in 4(d), moving
the wh phrase out of the PP is fine. The ungrammaticality of 4(c), then, is related
to its structure and not to its meaning.
The constraints on wh movement are not specific to English. Such constraints
operate in all languages that have wh movement. Like the principle of structure
dependency and the principles governing the organization of phrases, the constraints on wh movement are part of UG. These aspects of grammar need not be
learned. They are part of the innate blueprint for language that the child brings
to the task of acquiring a language. What children must learn are the languagespecific aspects of grammar. Where there are parameters of variation, children
must determine the correct choice for their language. The Japanese child must
determine that the verb comes after the object in the VP, and the English-speaking
child that the verb comes first. The Dutch-speaking child acquires a rule that
moves the verb, while the English-speaking child must restrict his rule to auxiliaries. Italian, English, and Czech children learn that to form a question, the wh
phrase moves, whereas Japanese and Swahili children determine that there is no
movement. As far as we can tell, children fix these parameters very quickly. We
will have more to say about how children set UG parameters in chapter 7.
Sign Language Syntax
All languages have rules of syntax similar in kind, if not in detail, to those of
English, and sign languages are no exception. Signed languages have phrase
structure rules that provide hierarchical structure and order constituents. A
signer distinguishes The dog chased the cat from The cat chased the dog through
the order of signing. The basic order of ASL is SVO. Unlike English, however,
adjectives follow the head noun in ASL.
ASL has a category Aux, which expresses notions such as tense, agreement,
modality, and so on. In Thai, to show that an action is continuous, the auxiliary verb kamlang is inserted before the verb. Thus kin means “eat” and kamlang kin means “is eating.” In English a form of be is inserted and the main
verb is changed to an -ing form. In ASL the sign for a verb such as eat may be
articulated with a sweeping, repetitive movement to achieve the same effect. The
sweeping, repetitive motion is a kind of auxiliary.
Many languages, including English, have a transformation that moves a direct
object to the beginning of the sentence to draw particular attention to it, as in:
Many greyhounds, my wife has rescued.
The transformation is called topicalization because an object to which
attention is drawn is generally the topic of the sentence or conversation. (The
d-structure underlying this sentence is My wife has rescued many greyhounds.)
In ASL a similar reordering of signs accompanied by raising the eyebrows
and tilting the head upward accomplishes the same effect. The head motion
and facial expressions of a signer function as markers of the special word order,
much as intonation does in English, or the attachment of prefixes or suffixes
might in other languages.
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There are constraints on topicalization similar to those on wh movement illustrated in a previous section. In English the following strings are
ungrammatical:
*Henchman, Sam Spade insulted the fat man’s.
*This film, John asked Mary whether she liked.
*Cheese, John ate bologna and for lunch.
Compare this with the grammatical:
The fat man’s henchman, Sam Spade insulted.
This film, John asked Mary to see with her.
Bologna and cheese, John ate for lunch.
Sign languages exhibit similar constraints. The signed sequence *Henchman,
Sam Spade insulted the fat man’s or the other starred examples are ungrammatical in ASL as in spoken languages.
ASL has wh phrases. The wh phrase in ASL may move or it may remain in
its d-structure position as in Japanese and Swahili. The ASL equivalents of Who
did Bill see yesterday? and Bill saw who yesterday? are both grammatical. As
in topicalization, wh questions are accompanied by a nonmanual marker. For
questions, this marker is a facial expression with furrowed brows and the head
tilted back.
ASL and other sign languages show an interaction of universal and languagespecific properties, just as spoken languages do. The rules of sign languages are
structure dependent, and movement rules are constrained in various ways, as
illustrated earlier. Other aspects are particular to sign languages, such as the
facial gestures, which are an integral part of the grammar of sign languages
but not of spoken languages. The fact that the principles and parameters of UG
hold in both the spoken and manual modalities shows that the human brain is
designed to acquire and use language, not simply speech.
Summary
Speakers of a language recognize the grammatical sentences of their language
and know how the words in a sentence must be ordered and grouped to convey
a certain meaning. All speakers are capable of producing and understanding an
unlimited number of new sentences that have never before been spoken or heard.
They also recognize ambiguities, know when different sentences mean the same
thing, and correctly interpret the grammatical relations in a sentence, such as
subject and direct object. This kind of knowledge comes from their knowledge
of the rules of syntax.
Sentences have structure that can be represented by phrase structure trees
containing syntactic categories. Phrase structure trees reflect the speaker’s mental representation of sentences. Ambiguous sentences may have more than one
phrase structure tree.
Phrase structure trees reveal the linear order of words and the constituency of
each syntactic category. There are different kinds of syntactic categories: Phrasal
categories, such as NP and VP, are composed of other syntactic categories; lexical categories, such as Noun and Verb, and functional categories, such as Det,
References for Further Reading
Aux, and C, are not decomposable and often correspond to individual words.
The internal structure of the phrasal categories is universal. It consists of a
head and its complements. The particular order of elements within the phrase is
accounted for by the phrase structure rules of each language. NPs, VPs, and so
on are headed by nouns, verbs, and the like. The sentence (S or TP) is headed by
Aux (or T), which carries such information as tense, agreement, and modality.
A grammar is a formally stated, explicit description of the mental grammar
or speaker’s linguistic competence. Phrase structure rules characterize the basic
phrase structure trees of the language, the d-structures.
Some PS rules allow the same syntactic category to appear repeatedly in a
phrase structure tree, such as a sentence embedded in another sentence. These
rules are recursive and reflect a speaker’s ability to produce countless sentences.
The lexicon represents the knowledge that speakers have about the vocabulary of their language. This knowledge includes the syntactic category of words
and what elements may occur together, expressed as c-selection or subcategorization. The lexicon also contains semantic information including the kinds of
NPs that can function as semantically coherent subjects and objects, s-selection.
Transformational rules account for relationships between sentences such as
declarative and interrogative pairs, including wh questions. Transformations
can move constituents. Much of the meaning of a sentence is interpreted from
its d-structure. The output of the transformational rules is the s-structure of a
sentence, the structure to which the phonological rules of the language apply.
Inflectional information such as tense, agreement, and possessive, among others, is represented as features in the phrase structure tree. After the rules of the
syntax have applied, these features are sometimes spelled out as affixes such as
-ed and -’s or as function words such as do.
The basic design of language is universal. Universal Grammar specifies that
syntactic rules are structure dependent and that movement rules may not move
phrases out of certain structures such as coordinate structures. These constraints
exist in all languages—spoken and signed—and need not be learned. UG also
contains parameters of variation, such as the order of heads and complements,
and the variations on movement rules. A child acquiring a language must fix the
parameters of UG for that language.
References for Further Reading
Baker, M. C. 2001. The atoms of language: The mind’s hidden rules of grammar. New
York: Basic Books.
Chomsky, N. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
______. 1972. Language and mind, rev. edn. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
______. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R. S. 1994. Patterns in the mind: Language and human nature. New York:
Basic Books.
Pinker, S. 1999. Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York:
HarperCollins.
Radford, A. 2009. Analysing English sentences: A minimalist approach. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
______. 2004. English syntax: An introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
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Exercises
1. Besides distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, the
rules of syntax account for other kinds of linguistic knowledge, such as
a. when a sentence is structurally ambiguous. (Cf. The boy saw the man
with a telescope.)
b. when two sentences with different structures mean the same thing. (Cf.
The father wept silently and The father silently wept.)
c. systematic relationships of form and meaning between two sentences,
like declarative sentences and their corresponding interrogative form.
(Cf. The boy can sleep and Can the boy sleep?)
Draw on your linguistic knowledge of English to come up with an example
illustrating each of these cases. (Use examples that are different from the
ones in the chapter.) Explain why your example illustrates the point. If you
know a language other than English, provide examples in that language, if
possible.
2. Consider the following sentences:
a. I hate war.
b. You know that I hate war.
c. He knows that you know that I hate war.
A. Write another sentence that includes sentence (c).
B. What does this set of sentences reveal about the nature of language?
C. How is this characteristic of human language related to the difference between linguistic competence and performance? (Hint:
Review these concepts in chapter 6.)
3. Paraphrase each of the following sentences in two ways to show that you
understand the ambiguity involved:
Example: Smoking grass can be nauseating.
i. Putting grass in a pipe and smoking it can make you sick.
ii. Fumes from smoldering grass can make you sick.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
Dick finally decided on the boat.
The professor’s appointment was shocking.
The design has big squares and circles.
That sheepdog is too hairy to eat.
Could this be the invisible man’s hair tonic?
The governor is a dirty street fighter.
I cannot recommend him too highly.
Terry loves his wife and so do I.
They said she would go yesterday.
No smoking section available.
4. A. Consider the following baseball joke (knowledge of baseball required):
Catcher to pitcher: “Watch out for this guy, he’s a great fastball hitter.”
Pitcher to catcher: “No problem. There’s no way I’ve got a great
fastball.”
Exercises
Explain the humor either by paraphrasing, or even better, with a tree
structure like the one we used early in the chapter for old men and
women without the syntactic categories.
B. Do the same for the advertising executive’s (honest?) claim that the new
magazine “has between one and two billion readers.”
5. Draw two phrase structure trees representing the two meanings of the sentence “The magician touched the child with the wand.” Be sure you indicate which meaning goes with which tree.
6. Draw the subtrees for the italicized NPs in the following sentences:
a. Every child’s mother hopes he will be happy.
b. The big dog’s bone is buried in the garden.
c. Angry men in dark glasses roamed the streets.
d. My aunt and uncle’s trip to Alaska was wonderful.
e. Challenge exercises: Whose dirty underwear is this?
f. The boy’s dog’s bone is in the pantry. (Hint: Use the rules
NP → Det N', Det → NP poss, NP → N'.)
7.
In all languages, sentences can occur within sentences. For example, in
exercise 2, sentence (b) contains sentence (a), and sentence (c) contains sentence (b). Put another way, sentence (a) is embedded in sentence (b), and
sentence (b) is embedded in sentence (c). Sometimes embedded sentences
appear slightly changed from their normal form, but you should be able to
recognize and underline the embedded sentences in the following examples.
Underline in the non-English sentences, when given, not in the translations
(the first one is done as an example):
a. Yesterday I noticed my accountant repairing the toilet.
b. Becky said that Jake would play the piano.
c. I deplore the fact that bats have wings.
d. That Guinevere loves Lorian is known to all my friends.
e. Who promised the teacher that Maxine wouldn’t be absent?
f. It’s ridiculous that he washes his own Rolls-Royce.
g. The woman likes for the waiter to bring water when she sits down.
h. The person who answers this question will win $100.
i. The idea of Romeo marrying a 13-year-old is upsetting.
j. I gave my hat to the nurse who helped me cut my hair.
k. For your children to spend all your royalty payments on recreational
drugs is a shame.
l. Give this fork to the person I’m getting the pie for.
m. khǎw chyâ
waǎ khruu
maa. (Thai)
He
believe that teacher come
He believes that the teacher is coming.
n. Je me demande quand il partira. (French)
I me ask
when he will leave
I wonder when he’ll leave.
o. Jan zei
dat Piet dit boek niet heeft gelezen. (Dutch)
Jan said that Piet this book not has
read
Jan said that Piet has not read this book.
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
8. Following the patterns of the various tree examples in the text, draw
phrase structure trees for the following sentences. (Hint: You may omit the
N' level whenever N' dominates a single N, so that, for example, the puppy
has the structure
NP
2
Det
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
N
The puppy found the child.
A frightened passenger landed the crippled airliner.
The house on the hill collapsed in the wind.
The ice melted.
The hot sun melted the ice.
A fast car with twin cams sped by the children on the grassy lane.
The old tree swayed in the wind.
Challenge exercise: The children put the toy in the box.
The reporter realized that the senator lied.
Broken ice melts in the sun.
My guitar gently weeps.
A stranger cleverly observed that a dangerous spy from the CIA lurks in
the alley by the old tenement. (Hint: See footnote 1, page 113.)
9. Use the rules on page 110 to create five phrase structure trees of 6, 7, 8, 9,
and 10 words. Use your mental lexicon to fill in the bottom of the tree.
10. We stated that the rules of syntax specify all and only the grammatical sentences of the language. Why is it important to say “only”? What would be
wrong with a grammar that specified as grammatical sentences all of the
truly grammatical ones plus a few that were not grammatical?
11. In this chapter we introduced X-bar theory, according to which each phrase
has three levels of structure.
a. Draw the subtree corresponding to each phrasal category, NP, AdjP, VP,
PP, as it would look according to X-bar notation.
b. Challenge exercise: What would the structure of CP be according to
X-bar notation?
c. Further challenge: Give a sample phrase structure for each tree that
fully exploits its entire structure—e.g., the father of the bride for the
NP.
12. Using one or more of the constituency tests (i.e., stand alone, move as a
unit, replacement by a pronoun) discussed in the chapter, determine which
of the boldfaced portions in the sentences are constituents. Provide the
grammatical category of the constituents.
a. Martha found a lovely pillow for the couch.
b. The light in this room is terrible.
c. I wonder if Bonnie has finished packing her books.
Exercises
d.
e.
f.
g.
Melissa slept in her class.
Pete and Max are fighting over the bone.
I gave a bone to Pete and to Max yesterday.
I gave a bone to Pete and to Max yesterday.
13. The two sentences below contain a verbal particle:
i. He ran up the bill.
ii. He ran the bill up.
The verbal particle up and the verb run depend on each other for the
unique idiosyncratic meaning of the phrasal verb run up. (Running up a
bill involves neither running nor the location up.) We showed earlier that
in such cases the particle and object do not form a constituent, hence they
cannot move as a unit:
iii. *Up the bill, John ran
(compare this to Up the hill John ran).
a. Using adverbs such as completely, show that the particle forms a constituent with the verb in [run up] the bill, while in run [up the hill], the
preposition and NP object form a constituent.
b. Now consider the following data:
i. Michael ran up the hill and over the bridge.
ii. *Michael ran up the bill and off his mouth.
iii. Michael ran up the bill and ran off his mouth.
Use the data to argue that expressions like up the bill and off his mouth
are not constituents.
14. In terms of c-selection restrictions, explain why the following are
ungrammatical:
a. *The man located.
b. *Jesus wept the apostles.
c. *Robert is hopeful of his children.
d. *Robert is fond that his children love animals.
e. *The children laughed the man.
15. In the chapter, we looked at transitive verbs that select a single NP direct
object like chase. English also has ditransitive verbs, ones that may be followed by two NPs, such as give:
The emperor gave the vassal a castle.
Think of three other ditransitive verbs in English and give example
sentences.
16. For each verb, list the different types of complements it selects and provide
an example of each type:
a. want
b. force
c. try
d. believe
e. say
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
17. Tamil is a language spoken in India by upward of 70 million people. Others, but not you, may find that they talk “funny,” as illustrated by wordfor-word translations of PPs from Tamil to English:
a. Tamil to English Meaning
the bed on
the village from
“on the bed”
“from the village”
i.
Based on these data, is Tamil a head initial or a head final
language?
ii. What would the phrase structure rule for PP look like in Tamil?
b. Here are two more word-for-word glosses:
she is a poet that think
the cobra is deadly that know
“think that she is a poet”
“know that the cobra is deadly”
i.
Do these further data support or detract from your analysis in
part (a)?
ii. What would the pertinent VP and CP rules look like in Tamil,
based on these data?
c. Give a word-for-word translation from Tamil of airplane on the runway and suppose that cobras spit.
d. Challenge exercise: Same as (c) for: believe that she sits by the well.
18. All wh phrases can move to the left periphery of the sentence.
a. Invent three sentences beginning with what, which, and where, in
which the wh word is not in its d-structure position in the sentence.
Give both the s-structure and d-structure versions of your sentence.
For example, using when: When could Marcy catch a flight out of
here? from Marcy could catch a flight out of here when?
b. Draw the phrase structure tree for one of these sentences using the
phrase structure and movement rules provided in the chapter.
c. Challenge exercise: How could you reformulate the movement rules
used to derive a wh question such as What has Mary done with her life?
using an X-bar CP structure (see question 11)?
19. There are many systematic, structure-dependent relationships among sentences similar to the one discussed in the chapter between declarative and
interrogative sentences. Here is another example based on ditransitive verbs
(see exercise 15):
The boy wrote the senator a letter.
The boy wrote a letter to the senator.
A philanthropist gave the animal rights movement $1 million.
A philanthropist gave $1 million to the animal rights movement.
a. Describe the relationship between the first and second members of the
pairs of sentences.
b. State why a transformation deriving one of these structures from the
other is plausible.
Exercises
20. State at least three differences between English and the following languages, using just the sentence(s) given. Ignore lexical differences (i.e., the
different vocabulary). Here is an example:
Thai:
dèg khon
níi
kamlang
kin.
boy classifier this progressive eat
“This boy is eating.”
mǎa tua
nán kin khâaw.
dog classifier that eat rice
“That dog ate rice.”
Three differences are (1) Thai has “classifiers.” They have no English
equivalent. (2) The words (determiners, actually) “this” and “that” follow
the noun in Thai, but precede the noun in English. (3) The “progressive” is
expressed by a separate word in Thai. The verb does not change form. In
English, the progressive is indicated by the presence of the verb to be and
the adding of -ing to the verb.
a. French
cet
homme intelligent comprendra
la question.
this man
intelligent will understand the question
“This intelligent man will understand the question.”
ces
hommes intelligents comprendront
les questions.
these men
intelligent will understand the questions
“These intelligent men will understand the questions.”
b. Japanese
watashi ga
sakana o
tabete
iru.
I
subject fish
object eat (ing) am
marker
marker
“I am eating fish.”
c. Swahili
mtoto
alivunja
kikombe.
mtoto
a- livunja kikombe
class
child
he past break class
cup
marker
marker
“The child broke the cup.”
watoto
wanavunja
vikombe.
watoto
wanavunja vikombe
class
child they present break class
cup
marker
marker
“The children break the cups.”
d. Korean
kɨ
sonyɔn-iee
wɨyu-lɨl
masi-ass-ta.
kɨ
sonyɔniee
wɨyu- lɨl
masi- assta
the boy
subject milk
object
drink past assertion
marker
marker
“The boy drank milk.”
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
kɨ-nɨn
muɔs-ɨl
kɨ nɨn
muɔsɨl
he subject what
object
marker
marker
“What did he eat?”
e. Tagalog
nakita ni
Pedro-ng
nakita ni
Pedro -ng
saw
article Pedro that
mɔk-ass-nɨnya.
mɔk- ass- nɨnya
eat
past question
puno
puno
full
na
na
already
ang
ang
topic
marker
bus.
bus.
bus
“Pedro saw that the bus was already full.”
21. Transformations may delete elements. For example, the s-structure of the
ambiguous sentence “George wants the presidency more than Martha”
may be derived from two possible d-structures:
a. George wants the presidency more than he wants Martha.
b. George wants the presidency more than Martha wants the presidency.
A deletion transformation either deletes he wants from the structure of
example (a), or wants the presidency from the structure of example (b).
This is a case of transformationally induced ambiguity: two different
d-structures with different semantic interpretations are transformed into a
single s-structure.
Explain the role of a deletion transformation similar to the ones just discussed in the following humorous dialogue between “two old married
folks.”
he:
Do you still love me as much as you used to?
she: As much as I used to what?
22. Challenge exercise: Compare the following French and English sentences:
French
English
Jean boit toujours du vin.
John always drinks some wine.
Jean drinks always some wine
*John drinks always some wine
(*Jean toujours boit du vin)
Marie lit jamais le journal.
Mary never reads the newspaper.
Marie reads never the newspaper
*Mary reads never the newspaper.
(*Marie jamais lit le journal)
Pierre lave souvent ses chiens.
Peter often washes his dogs.
Pierre washes often his dogs
*Peter washes often his dogs.
(*Pierre souvent lave ses chiens.)
a. Based on the above data, what would you hypothesize concerning the
position of adverbs in French and English?
b. Now suppose that UG specifies that in all languages adverbs of frequency (e.g., always, never, often, sometimes) immediately precede the
VP, as in the following tree. What rule would you need to hypothesize
to derive the correct surface word order for French? (Hint: Adverbs are
not allowed to move.)
Exercises
S
NP
2
@
John
Jean
VP
2
Aux
g
pres.
VP
2
Adv
g
always
toujours
VP
2
V
g
drinks
boit
NP
@
wine
du vin
c. Do any verbs in English follow the same pattern as the French verbs?
23. a. Give the tree corresponding to the underlined portion of the sentence
The hole should have been being filled by the workcrew.
b. Give the tree corresponding to the VP cursed the day I was born the
day I was born.
Which must come first, the AdvP or the NP? (You needn’t worry about
the internal structure of the AdvP or NP.)
24. Show that an embedded CP is a constituent by applying the constituency
tests (stand alone, move as a unit, and replace with a pronoun). Consider
the following sentences in formulating your answer, and provide further
examples if you can. (The boldfaced words are the CP.)
Sam asked if he could play soccer.
I wonder whether Michael walked the dog.
Cher believes that the students know the answer.
It is a problem that Sam broke his arm.
25. Challenge exercise:
a. Give the d-structure tree for Which dog does Michael think loves
bones? (Hint: The complementizer that must be present.)
b. Give the d-structure tree for What does Michael think that his dog
loves?
c. Consider these data:
i. *Which dog does Michael think that loves bones?
ii. What does Michael think his dog loves?
In (ii) a complementizer deletion rule has deleted that. The rule is
optional because the sentence is grammatical with or without that.
In (i), however, the complementizer must be deleted to prevent the
ungrammatical sentence from being generated. What factor governs the
optionality of the rule?
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CHAPTER 2 Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language
26. Dutch and German are Germanic languages related to English, and as in
English wh questions are formed by moving a wh phrase to sentence initial
position.
a. In what way are the rules of question formation in Dutch and German
different from English? Base your answer on the following data:
German
i.
Dutch
Was hat Karl gekauft?
Wat
heeft Wim gekocht?
what has Karl bought
what has
Wim bought
“What has Karl bought?”
“What has Wim bought?”
ii. Was
kauft Karl?
Wat
koopt Wim?
What buys
Karl
what
buys
Wim
“What does Karl buy?”
“What does Wim buy?”
iii. Kauft Karl das Buch?
Koopt Wim het boek?
buys
Karl the book
buys
Wim the book
“Does Karl buy the book?”
“Does Wim buy the book?”
b. Challenge exercise: Consider the following declarative sentences in
Dutch and German:
iv. Karl kaufte
das Buch.
Wim kocht
het boek.
Karl bought the book
Wim bought the book
“Karl bought the book.”
“Wim bought the book.”
v. Das Buch kaufte Karl.
Het boek kocht
Wim.
The book bought Karl
the
book bought Wim
“Karl bought the book.”
“Wim bought the book.”
vi. Das
Buch kaufte
Karl gestern.
the
book bought
Karl yesterday
“Karl bought the book yesterday.”
Het
boek kocht
Wim gisteren.
the
book bought
Wim yesterday
“Wim bought the book yesterday.”
vii. Gestern
kaufte
Karl
das Buch
Yesterday bought Karl
the book
“Yesterday Karl bought the book.”
Gisteren
kocht
Wim
het boek.
yesterday
bought Wim
the book
“Yesterday Wim bought the book.”
What rules derive the different word order in declarative sentences?
(Hint: There are two rules, one involving movement of the verb, and the
other movement of an XP.)
c. Are either of the rules in (b) familiar from the German/Dutch questions
in (i)–(iii)?
3
The Meaning
of Language
Surely all this is not without meaning.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick, 1851
For thousands of years philosophers have pondered the meaning of meaning, yet
speakers of a language can easily understand what is said to them and can produce strings of words that are meaningful to other speakers. We use language
to convey information to others (My new bike is pink), ask questions (Who left
the party early?), give commands (Stop lying!), and express wishes (May there
be peace on earth).
What do you know about meaning when you know a language? To begin
with, you know when a “word” is meaningful (flick) or meaningless (blick),
and you know when a “sentence” is meaningful (Jack swims) or meaningless
(swims metaphorical every). You know when a word has two meanings (bear)
and when a sentence has two meanings (Jack saw a man with a telescope). You
know when two words have the same meaning (sofa and couch), and when two
sentences have the same meaning (Jack put off the meeting, Jack put the meeting off). And you know when words or sentences have opposite meanings (alive/
dead; Jack swims/Jack doesn’t swim).
You generally know the real-world object that words refer to like the chair
in the corner; and even if the words do not refer to an actual object, such as the
unicorn behind the bush, you still have a sense of what they mean, and if the particular object happened to exist, you would have the knowledge to identify it.
You know, or have the capacity to discover, when sentences are true or false.
That is, if you know the meaning of a sentence, you know its truth conditions. In
some cases it’s obvious, or redundant (all kings are male [true], all bachelors are
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married [false]); in other cases you need some further, nonlinguistic knowledge
(Molybdenum conducts electricity), but by knowing the meaning, you know the
kind of world knowledge that is needed. Often, if you know that a sentence is
true (Nina bathed her dogs), you can infer that another sentence must also be
true (Nina’s dogs got wet), that is, the first sentence entails the second sentence.
All of this knowledge about meaning extends to an unlimited set of sentences,
just like our syntactic knowledge, and is part of the grammar of the language.
Part of the job of the linguist is to reveal and make explicit this knowledge about
meaning that every speaker has.
The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences is called semantics. Subfields of semantics are lexical semantics, which is
concerned with the meanings of words, and the meaning relationships among
words; and phrasal or sentential semantics, which is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word. The study of how context affects
meaning—for example, how the sentence It’s cold in here comes to be interpreted as “close the windows” in certain situations—is called pragmatics.
What Speakers Know
about Sentence Meaning
Language without meaning is meaningless.
ROMAN JAKOBSON
In this section we discuss the linguistic knowledge you have that permits you
to determine whether a sentence is true or false, when one sentence implies the
truth or falsehood of another, and whether a sentence has multiple meanings.
One way to account for this knowledge is by formulating semantic rules that
build the meaning of a sentence from the meaning of its words and the way the
words combine syntactically. This is often called truth-conditional semantics
because it takes speakers’ knowledge of truth conditions as basic. It is also called
compositional semantics because it calculates the truth value of a sentence by
composing, or putting together, the meaning of smaller units. We will limit our
discussion to declarative sentences like Jack swims or Jack kissed Laura, because
we can judge these kinds of sentences as either true or false. At least part of their
meaning, then, will be their truth value.
Truth
. . . Having Occasion to talk of Lying and false Representation, it was with much Difficulty
that he comprehended what I meant. . . . For he argued thus: That the Use of Speech was
to make us understand one another and to receive Information of Facts; now if any one
said the Thing which was not, these Ends were defeated; because I cannot properly be said
to understand him. . . . And these were all the Notions he had concerning that Faculty of
Lying, so perfectly well understood, and so universally practiced among human Creatures.
JONATHAN SWIFT, Gulliver’s Travels, 1726
What Speakers Know about Sentence Meaning
Let’s begin by returning to Jack, who is swimming in the pool. If you are poolside and you hear the sentence Jack swims, and you know the meaning of that
sentence, then you will judge the sentence to be true. On the other hand, if you
are indoors and you happen to believe that Jack never learned to swim, then
when you hear the very same sentence Jack swims, you will judge the sentence
to be false and you will think the speaker is misinformed or lying. More generally, if you know the meaning of a sentence, then you can determine under what
conditions it is true or false.
You do not need to actually know whether a sentence is true or false to know
its meaning. Knowing the meaning tells you how to determine the truth value.
The sentence copper conducts electricity has meaning and is perfectly understood precisely because we know how to determine whether it’s true or false.
Knowing the meaning of a sentence, then, means knowing under what circumstances it would be true or false according to your knowledge of the world,
namely its truth conditions. Reducing the question of meaning to the question
of truth conditions has proved to be very fruitful in understanding the semantic
properties of language.
For most sentences it does not make sense to say that they are always true
or always false. Rather, they are true or false in a given situation, as we previously saw with Jack swims. But a restricted number of sentences are indeed
always true regardless of the circumstances. They are called tautologies. (The
term analytic is also used for such sentences.) Examples of tautologies are sentences like Circles are round or A person who is single is not married. Their
truth is guaranteed solely by the meaning of their parts and the way they are
put together. Similarly, some sentences are always false. These are called contradictions. Examples of contradictions are sentences like Circles are square or A
bachelor is married.
Entailment and Related Notions
You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that
you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever
about you.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “The Norwood Builder,” in The Memoirs of Sherlock
Holmes, 1894
Much of what we know is deduced from what people say alongside our observations of the world. As we can deduce from the quotation, Sherlock Holmes
took deduction to the ultimate degree. Often, deductions can be made based on
language alone.
If you know that the sentence Jack swims beautifully is true, then you also
know that the sentence Jack swims must also be true. This meaning relation is
called entailment. We say that Jack swims beautifully entails Jack swims. More
generally, one sentence entails another if whenever the first sentence is true the
second one is also true, in all conceivable circumstances.
Generally, entailment goes only in one direction. So while the sentence Jack
swims beautifully entails Jack swims, the reverse is not true. Knowing merely that
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Jack swims is true does not necessitate the truth of Jack swims beautifully. Jack
could be a poor swimmer. On the other hand, negating both sentences reverses
the entailment. Jack doesn’t swim entails Jack doesn’t swim beautifully.
The notion of entailment can be used to reveal knowledge that we have about
other meaning relations. For example, omitting tautologies and contradictions,
two sentences are synonymous (or paraphrases) if they are both true or both
false with respect to the same situations. Sentences like Jack put off the meeting
and Jack postponed the meeting are synonymous, because when one is true the
other must be true; and when one is false the other must also be false. We can
describe this pattern in a more concise way by using the notion of entailment:
Two sentences are synonymous if they entail each other.
Thus if sentence A entails sentence B and vice versa, then whenever A is true
B is true, and vice versa. Although entailment says nothing specifically about
false sentences, it’s clear that if sentence A entails sentence B, then whenever
B is false, A must be false. (If A were true, B would have to be true.) And if B
also entails A, then whenever A is false, B would have to be false. Thus mutual
entailment guarantees identical truth values in all situations; the sentences are
synonymous.
Two sentences are contradictory if, whenever one is true, the other is false or,
equivalently, there is no situation in which they are both true or both false. For
example, the sentences Jack is alive and Jack is dead are contradictory because if
the sentence Jack is alive is true, then the sentence Jack is dead is false, and vice
versa. In other words, Jack is alive and Jack is dead have opposite truth values.
Like synonymy, contradiction can be reduced to a special case of entailment.
Two sentences are contradictory if one entails the negation of the other.
For instance, Jack is alive entails the negation of Jack is dead, namely Jack
is not dead. Similarly, Jack is dead entails the negation of Jack is alive, namely
Jack is not alive.
The notions of contradiction (always false) and contradictory (opposite in
truth value) are related in that if two sentences are contradictory, their conjunction with and is a contradiction. Thus Jack is alive and Jack is dead is a contradiction; it cannot be true under any circumstances.
Ambiguity
Let’s pass gas.
SEEN ON A SIGN IN THE LUNCHROOM OF AN ELECTRIC UTILITY COMPANY
Our semantic knowledge tells us when words or phrases (including sentences)
have more than one meaning, that is, when they are ambiguous. In chapter 2 we
saw that the sentence The boy saw the man with a telescope was an instance of
structural ambiguity. It is ambiguous because it can mean that the boy saw the
man by using a telescope or that the boy saw the man who was holding a telescope. The sentence is structurally ambiguous because it is associated with two
What Speakers Know about Sentence Meaning
different phrase structures, each corresponding to a different meaning. Here are
the two structures:
(1)
NP
Det
g
The
S
5
N
g
boy
VP
5
VP
V
g
saw
NP
2
N
g
man
Det
g
the
P
g
with
PP
NP
Det
g
a
N
g
telescope
(2)
S
NP
Det
g
The
VP
N
g
V
g
NP
NP
2
Det
N
g
g
PP
boy saw
the
P
g
man with
NP
Det
g
a
N
g
telescope
In (1) the PP with a telescope modifies the VP, and the interpretation is that
the action of seeing occurred by use of a telescope. In (2) the PP with a telescope modifies the NP the man, and the interpretation is that the man has the
telescope.
Lexical ambiguity arises when at least one word in a phrase has more than
one meaning. For instance the sentence This will make you smart is ambiguous because of the two meanings of the word smart: “clever” or “burning
sensation.”
Our knowledge of lexical and structural ambiguities reveals that the meaning
of a linguistic expression is built both on the words it contains and its syntactic structure. The notion that the meaning of an expression is composed of the
meanings of its parts and how they are combined structurally is referred to as the
principle of compositionality. In the next section we discuss the rules by which
the meaning of a phrase or sentence is determined based on its composition.
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Compositional Semantics
To account for speakers’ knowledge of grammaticality, constituent structure,
and relations between sentences, as well as for the limitless creativity of our
linguistic competence, we concluded (chapter 2) that the grammar must contain
syntactic rules.
To account for speaker’s knowledge of the truth, reference, entailment, and
ambiguity of sentences, as well as for our ability to determine the meaning of
a limitless number of expressions, we must suppose that the grammar contains
semantic rules that combine the meanings of words into meaningful phrases and
sentences.
Semantic Rules
In the sentence Jack swims, we know that the word Jack, which is a proper
name, refers to a precise object in the world, which is its referent. For instance,
in the scenario given earlier, the referential meaning of Jack is the guy who is
your friend and who is swimming happily in the pool right now. Based on this,
we conclude that the meaning of the name Jack is the individual it refers to.
What about the meaning of the verb swim? Part of its meaning is the group
or set of individuals (human beings and animals) that swim. You will see in a
moment how this aspect of the meaning of swim helps us understand sentences
in a way that accords with our semantic knowledge.
Our semantic rules must be sensitive not only to the meaning of individual
words but to the structure in which they occur. Taking as an example our simple
sentence Jack swims, let us see how the semantic rules compute its meaning. The
meanings of the individual words are summarized as follows:
Word
Meanings
Jack
swims
refers to (or means) the individual Jack
refers to (or means) the set of individuals that swim
The phrase structure tree for our sentence is as follows:
S
5
NP
VP
g
g
Jack
swims
The tree tells us that syntactically the NP Jack and the VP swims combine to
form a sentence. We want to mirror that combination at the semantic level: in
other words, we want to combine the meaning of the NP Jack (an individual)
and the meaning of the VP swims (a set of individuals) to obtain the meaning of
the S Jack swims. This is done by means of Semantic Rule I.
Compositional Semantics
Semantic Rule I
The meaning of [S NP VP] is the following truth condition:
If the meaning of NP (an individual) is a member of the meaning of VP (a set
of individuals), then S is TRUE, otherwise it is FALSE.
Rule I states that a sentence composed of a subject NP and a predicate VP is
true if the subject NP refers to an individual who is among the members of the
set that constitute the meaning of the VP. This rule is entirely general; it does not
refer to any particular sentence, individuals, or verbs. It works equally well for
sentences like Ellen sings or Max barks. Thus the meaning of Max barks is the
truth condition (i.e., the “if-sentence”) that states that the sentence is true if the
individual denoted by Max is among the set of barking individuals.
Let us now try a slightly more complex case: the sentence Jack kissed Laura.
The main syntactic difference between this example and the previous one is that
we now have a transitive verb that requires an extra NP in object position; otherwise our semantic rules will derive the meaning using the same mechanical
procedure as in the first example. We again start with the word meaning and
syntactic structure:
Word
Meanings
Jack
Laura
kissed
refers to (or means) the individual Jack
refers to (or means) the individual Laura
refers to (or means) the set of pairs of individuals X and Y such
that X kissed Y.
Here is the phrase structure tree.
S
NP
g
Jack
VP
2
V
g
kissed
NP
g
Laura
The meaning of the transitive verb kiss is still a set, but this time a set of
pairs of individuals. The meaning of the VP, however, is still a set of individuals,
namely those individuals who kissed Laura. This may be expressed formally in
Semantic Rule II.
Semantic Rule II
The meaning of [ VP V NP] is the set of individuals X such that X is the
first member of any pair in the meaning of V whose second member is the
meaning of NP.
The meaning of the sentence is derived by first applying Semantic Rule II,
which establishes the meaning of the VP as a certain set of individuals, namely
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those who kissed Laura. Now Semantic Rule I applies without further ado and
gives the meaning of the sentence as the truth condition that determines S to be
true whenever the meaning of Jack is a member of the set that is the meaning
of the VP kissed Laura. In other words, S is true if Jack kissed Laura and false
otherwise. These two semantic rules handle an essentially infinite number of
intransitive and transitive sentences.
One last example will illustrate how the semantic knowledge of entailment
may be represented in the grammar. Consider Jack swims beautifully, and consider further the meaning of the adverb beautifully. Its meaning is clearly not
an individual or a set of individuals. Rather, the meaning of beautifully is an
operation that reduces the size of the sets that are the meanings of verb phrases.
When applied to the meaning of swims, it reduces the set of individuals who
swim to the smaller set of those who swim beautifully. We won’t express this
rule formally, but it is now easy to see one source of entailment. The truth conditions that make Jack swims beautifully true are narrower than the truth conditions that make Jack swims true by virtue of the fact that among the individuals
who swim, fewer of them swim beautifully. Therefore, any truth condition that
causes Jack swims beautifully to be true necessarily causes Jack swims to be
true, hence Jack swims beautifully entails Jack swims.
These rules, and many more like them, account for our knowledge about the
truth value of sentences by taking the meanings of words and combining them
according to the syntactic structure of the sentence. It is easy to see from these
examples how ambiguous meanings arise. Because the meaning of a sentence is
computed based on its hierarchical organization, different trees will have different meanings—structural ambiguity—even when the words are the same, as in
the example The boy saw the man with a telescope. The occurrence of an ambiguous word—lexical ambiguity—when it combines with the other elements of a
sentence, can make the entire sentence ambiguous, as in She can’t bear children.
The semantic theory of sentence meaning that we just sketched is not the
only possible one, and it is also incomplete, as shown by the paradoxical sentence This sentence is false. The sentence cannot be true, else it’s false; it cannot
be false, else it’s true. Therefore it has no truth value, though it certainly has
meaning. This notwithstanding, compositional truth-conditional semantics has
proven to be an extremely powerful and useful tool for investigating the semantic properties of natural languages.
When Compositionality Goes Awry
A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regular and orderly
composition.
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–1784)
The meaning of an expression is not always obvious, even to a native speaker of
the language. Meanings may be obscured in many ways, or at least may require
some imagination or special knowledge to be apprehended. Poets, pundits, and
yes, even professors can be difficult to understand.
In the previous sections we saw that semantic rules compute sentence meaning
compositionally based on the meanings of words and the syntactic structure that
Compositional Semantics
contains them. There are, however, interesting cases in which compositionality
breaks down, either because there is a problem with words or with the semantic
rules. If one or more words in a sentence do not have a meaning, then obviously
we will not be able to compute a meaning for the entire sentence. Moreover,
even if the individual words have meaning but cannot be combined together as
required by the syntactic structure and related semantic rules, we will also not
get to a meaning. We refer to these situations as semantic anomaly. Alternatively,
it might require a lot of creativity and imagination to derive a meaning. This is
what happens in metaphors. Finally, some expressions—called idioms—have a
fixed meaning, that is, a meaning that is not compositional. Applying compositional rules to idioms gives rise to funny or inappropriate meanings.
Anomaly
Don’t tell me of a man’s being able to talk sense; everyone can talk sense. Can he talk
nonsense?
WILLIAM PITT
There is no greater mistake in the world than the looking upon every sort of nonsense as
want of sense.
LEIGH HUNT, “On the Talking of Nonsense,” 1820
The semantic properties of words determine what other words they can be combined with. A sentence widely used by linguists that we encountered in chapter
2 illustrates this fact:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
The sentence obeys all the syntactic rules of English. The subject is colorless
green ideas and the predicate is sleep furiously. It has the same syntactic structure as the sentence
Dark green leaves rustle furiously.
but there is obviously something semantically wrong with the sentence. The
meaning of colorless includes the semantic feature “without color,” but it is
combined with the adjective green, which has the feature “green in color.” How
can something be both “without color” and “green in color”? Other semantic
violations occur in the sentence. Such sentences are semantically anomalous.
Other English “sentences” make no sense at all because they include “words”
that have no meaning; they are uninterpretable. They can be interpreted only if
some meaning for each nonsense word can be dreamt up. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is probably the most famous poem in which most of the content
words have no meaning—they do not exist in the lexicon of the grammar. Still,
all the sentences sound as if they should be or could be English sentences:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
...
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He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
Without knowing what vorpal means, you nevertheless know that
He took his vorpal sword in hand
means the same thing as
He took his sword, which was vorpal, in hand.
It was in his hand that he took his vorpal sword.
Knowing the language, and assuming that vorpal means the same thing in the
three sentences (because the same sounds are used), you can decide that the
sense—the truth conditions—of the three sentences are identical. In other words,
you are able to decide that two things mean the same thing even though you do
not know what either one means. You decide by assuming that the semantic
properties of vorpal are the same whenever it is used.
We now see why Alice commented, when she had read “Jabberwocky”:
“It seems very pretty, but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she
didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.)
“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know
what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any
rate—”
Semantic violations in poetry may form strange but interesting aesthetic images,
as in Dylan Thomas’s phrase a grief ago. Ago is ordinarily used with words
specified by some temporal semantic feature:
a week ago
an hour ago
a month ago
a century ago
but not
*a table ago
*a dream ago
*a mother ago
When Thomas used the word grief with ago, he was adding a durational feature
to grief for poetic effect, so while the noun phrase is anomalous, it evokes certain feelings.
In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, there are phrases like
the six subjunctive crumbs twitch.
a man . . . wearing a round jeer for a hat.
children building this rainman out of snow.
Though all of these phrases violate some semantic rules, we can understand
them; breaking the rules creates the imagery desired. The fact that we are able to
understand, or at least interpret, anomalous expressions, and at the same time
recognize their anomalous nature, demonstrates our knowledge of the semantic
system and semantic properties of the language.
Compositional Semantics
Metaphor
Our doubts are traitors.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Measure for Measure, c. 1603
Walls have ears.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Don Quixote, 1605
The night has a thousand eyes and the day but one.
FRANCES WILLIAM BOURDILLON, “Light,” 1873
When what appears to be an anomaly is nevertheless understood in terms of a
meaningful concept, the expression becomes a metaphor. There is no strict line
between anomalous and metaphorical expressions. Technically, metaphors are
anomalous, but the nature of the anomaly creates the salient meanings that metaphors usually have. The anomalous A grief ago might come to be interpreted by
speakers of English as “the unhappy time following a sad event” and therefore
become a metaphor.
Metaphors may have a literal meaning as well as their metaphorical meaning, so in some sense they are ambiguous. However, when the semantic rules are
applied to Walls have ears, for example, the literal meaning is so unlikely that
listeners use their imagination for another interpretation. The principle of compositionality is very “elastic” and when it fails to produce an acceptable literal
meaning, listeners try to accommodate and stretch the meaning. This accommodation is based on semantic properties that are inferred or that provide some
kind of resemblance or comparison that can end up as a meaningful concept.
This works only up to a certain point, however. It’s not clear what the literal meaning of Our doubts are traitors might be, though the conceptual meaning that the act of doubting a precious belief is self-betrayal seems plausible. To
interpret a metaphor we need to understand the individual words, the literal
meaning of the whole expression, and facts about the world. To understand the
metaphor
Time is money
it is necessary to know that in our society we are often paid according to the
number of hours or days worked. In fact, “time,” which is an abstract concept,
is the subject of multiple metaphors. We “save time,” “waste time,” “manage
time,” push things “back in time,” live on “borrowed time,” and suffer the “ravages of time” as the “sands of time” drift away. In effect, the metaphors take the
abstract concept of time and treat it as a concrete object of value.
Metaphor has a strong cultural component. Shakespeare uses metaphors that
are lost on many of today’s playgoers. “I am a man whom Fortune hath cruelly
scratched,” is most effective as a metaphor in a society like Shakespeare’s that
commonly depicts “Fortune” as a woman. On the other hand There’s a bug in
my program would make little sense in a culture without computers, even if the
idea of having bugs in something indicates a problem.
Many expressions now taken literally may have originated as metaphors, such
as “the fall of the dollar,” meaning its decline in value on the world market.
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Many people wouldn’t bat an eyelash (another metaphor) at the literal interpretation of saving or wasting time. Metaphor is one of the factors in language
change (see chapter 10). Metaphorical use of language is language creativity at
its highest. Nevertheless, the basis of metaphorical use is very much the ordinary
linguistic knowledge that all speakers possess about words, their semantic properties, and their combinatorial possibilities.
Idioms
HAGAR THE HORRIBLE © King Features Syndicate. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
Compositional Semantics
Because the words (or morphemes) of a language are arbitrary (not predictable
by rule), they must be listed in a mental lexicon. The lexicon is a repository of
the words (or morphemes) of a language and their meanings. On the other hand,
the meanings of morphologically complex words, phrases, and sentences are
compositional and are derived by rules. We noted in chapter 1 that the meaning
of some words (for example, compounds) is not predictable, so these must also
be given in the lexicon. It turns out that languages also contain many phrases
whose meanings are not predictable on the basis of the meanings of the individual words. These phrases typically start out as metaphors that “catch on” and
are repeated so often that they become fixtures in the language. Such expressions are called idioms, or idiomatic phrases, as in these English examples:
sell down the river
rake over the coals
drop the ball
let their hair down
put his foot in his mouth
throw her weight around
snap out of it
cut it out
hit it off
get it off
bite your tongue
give a piece of your mind
Here is where the usual semantic rules for combining meanings do not apply.
The principle of compositionality is superseded by expressions that act very
much like individual morphemes in that they are not decomposable, but have a
fixed meaning that must be learned. Idioms are similar in structure to ordinary
phrases except that they tend to be frozen in form and do not readily undergo
rules that change word order or substitution of their parts.
Thus, the sentence in (1) has the same structure as the sentence in (2).
1.
2.
She put her foot in her mouth.
She put her bracelet in her drawer.
But while the sentences in (3) and (4) are clearly related to (2),
3.
4.
The drawer in which she put her bracelet was hers.
Her bracelet was put in her drawer.
the sentences in (5) and (6) do not have the idiomatic sense of sentence (1), except,
perhaps, humorously.
5.
6.
The mouth in which she put her foot was hers.
Her foot was put in her mouth.
Also, if we know the meaning of (2) and the meaning of the word “necklace” we
will immediately understand (7).
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7.
She put her necklace in the drawer.
But if we try substituting “hand” for “foot” in sentence (1), we do not maintain
the idiomatic meaning, but rather have the literal compositional meaning.
There are, however, some idioms whose parts can be moved without affecting
the idiomatic sense:
The FBI kept tabs on radicals.
Tabs were kept on radicals by the FBI.
Radicals were kept tabs on by the FBI.
Like metaphors, idioms can break the rules on combining semantic properties. The object of eat must usually be something with the semantic feature
“edible,” but in
He ate his hat.
Eat your heart out.
this restriction is violated.
Idioms often lead to humor:
What did the doctor tell the vegetarian about his surgically implanted heart
valve from a pig?
That it was okay as long as he didn’t “eat his heart out.”
They may also be used to create what appear to be paradoxes. In many places
such as Times Square in New York, a ball is dropped at midnight on New Year’s
Eve. Now, if the person in charge doesn’t drop the ball, then he has “dropped
the ball.” And if that person does indeed drop the ball, then he has not “dropped
the ball.” Right?
Idioms, grammatically as well as semantically, have special characteristics.
They must be entered into the lexicon or mental dictionary as single items with
their meanings specified, and speakers must learn the special restrictions on
their use in sentences.
All languages have idioms, but idioms rarely if ever translate word for word
from one language to another. Most speakers of American English understand
the idiom to kick the bucket as meaning “to die.” The same combination of
words in Spanish (patear el cubo) has only the literal meaning of striking a specific bucket with a foot. On the other hand, estirar la pata, literally “to stretch
the (animal) leg,” has the idiomatic sense of “to die” in Spanish.
Most idioms originate as metaphorical expressions that establish themselves
in the language and become frozen in their form and meaning.
Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings)
“There’s glory for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.
Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings)
“Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’ ” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I
choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different
things.”
LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
As just discussed, the meaning of a phrase or sentence is partially a function
of the meanings of the words it contains. Similarly, the meaning of morphologically complex words is a function of their component morphemes, as we saw
in chapter 1. However, there is a fundamental difference between word meaning—or lexical semantics—and sentence meaning. The meaning of entries in
the mental lexicon—be they morphemes, words, compound words, idioms, and
so on—is conventional; that is, speakers of a language implicitly agree on their
meaning, and children acquiring the language must simply learn those meanings
outright. On the other hand, the meaning of most sentences must be constructed
by the application of semantic rules. Earlier we discussed the rules of semantic
composition. In this section we will talk about word meaning and the semantic
relationships that exist between words and morphemes.
Although the agreed-upon meaning of a word may shift over time within a
language community, we are not free as individuals to change the meanings of
words at will; if we did, we would be unable to communicate with each other.
Humpty Dumpty seems unwilling to accept this convention, though fortunately
for us there are few Humpty Dumptys. All the speakers of a language share a
basic vocabulary—the sounds and meanings of morphemes and words. Each of
us knows the meanings of thousands of words. This knowledge permits us to
use words to express our thoughts and to understand the thoughts of others.
The meaning of words is part of linguistic knowledge. Your mental storehouse
of information about words and morphemes is what we have been calling the
lexicon.
Dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) or Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary are filled with words and their meanings. Dictionaries give
the meaning of words using other words rather than in terms of some more
basic units of meaning, whatever they might be. In this sense a dictionary really
provides paraphrases rather than meanings. It relies on our knowledge of the
language to understand the definitions. The meanings associated with words in
our mental lexicon are probably not like what we find in the OED or Webster’s,
although it is admittedly very difficult to specify precisely how word meanings
are represented in the mind.
Theories of Word Meaning
It is natural . . . to think of there being connected with a sign . . . besides . . . the reference
of the sign, also what I should like to call the sense of the sign. . . .
GOTTLOB FREGE, “On Sense and Reference,” 1892
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If the meaning of a word is not like a dictionary entry, what is it? This question
has been debated by philosophers and linguists for centuries. One proposal is
that the meaning of a word or expression is its reference, its association with the
object it refers to. This real world object is called the referent.
Reference
© The New Yorker Collection 1992 Michael Maslin from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
We have already determined that the meaning of proper names like Jack is its
reference, that link between the word Jack and the person named Jack, which is
its referent. Proper names are noun phrases (NPs); you can substitute a proper
name in any NP position in a sentence and preserve grammaticality. There are
other NPs that refer to individuals as well. For instance, NPs like the happy
swimmer, my friend, and that guy can all be used to refer to Jack in the situation
where you’ve observed Jack swimming. The same is true for pronouns such as I,
you, and him, which also function as NPs. In all these cases, the reference of the
NP—which singles out the individual referred to under the circumstances—is
part of the meaning of the NP.
On the other hand, not every NP refers to an individual. For instance, the
sentence No baby swims contains the NP no baby, but your linguistic knowledge tells you that this NP does not refer to any specific individual. If no baby
has no reference, but is not meaningless, then something about meaning beyond
reference must be present.
Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings)
Also in support of that “extra something” is our knowledge that, while under
certain circumstances the happy swimmer and Jack may have the same reference
in that both expressions are associated with the same referent, the former has
some further meaning. To see this, we observe that the happy swimmer is happy
is a tautology—true in every conceivable situation, but Jack is happy is not a
tautology, for there are circumstances under which that sentence might be false.
Sense
If meaning were reference alone, then the meaning of words and expressions
would be entirely dependent on the objects pointed out in the real world. For
example, the meaning of dog would be tied to the set of canine objects. This
theory of word meaning is attractive because it underscores the idea that meaning is a connection between language on the one hand, and objects and events in
the world on the other.
An obvious problem for such a theory, however, is that speakers know many
words that have no real-world referents (e.g., hobbits, unicorns, and Harry Potter). Yet speakers do know the meanings of these expressions. Similarly, what
real-world entities would function words like of and by, or modal verbs such as
will or may refer to?
A further problem is that two expressions may refer to the same individual
but not have the same meaning, as we saw with Jack and the happy swimmer.
For another example, Barack Obama and the President currently refer to the
same individual, but the meaning of the NP the President is, in addition, something like “the head of state,” which is an element of meaning separate from
reference and more enduring. This element of meaning is often termed sense. It
is the extra something referred to earlier. Unicorns, hobbits, and Harry Potter
have sense but no reference (with regard to objects in the real world). Conversely,
proper names typically have only reference. A name like Chris Jones may point
out a certain person, its referent, but has little linguistic meaning beyond that.
Sometimes two different proper names have the same referent, such as Mark
Twain and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or Unabomber and Theodore Kaczynski. Such pairs of noun phrases are coreferential. It is a hotly debated question
in the philosophy of language as to whether coreferential expressions have the
same or different senses.
Another proposal is that the meaning of a word is the mental image it conjures up in the mind of speakers. This solves the problem of unicorns, hobbits,
and Harry Potter; we may have a clear image of these entities from books, movies, and so on, and that connection might serve as reference for those expressions. However, many meaningful expressions are not associated with any clear,
unique image agreed on by most speakers of the language. For example, what
image is evoked by the expressions very, if, and every? It’s difficult to say, yet
these expressions are certainly meaningful. What is the image of oxygen as distinct from nitrogen—both are clear gases, yet they mean very different things.
What mental image would we have of dog that is general enough to include
Yorkshire Terriers and Great Danes and yet excludes foxes and wolves? Astronauts will likely have a very different mental image of the expression space capsule than the average person, yet non-astronauts and astronauts do communicate with one another if they speak the same language.
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Although the idea that the meaning of a word corresponds to a mental image
is intuitive (because many words do provoke imagery), it is clearly inadequate as
a general explanation of what people know about word meanings.
Perhaps the best we can do is to note that the reference part of a word’s meaning, if it has reference at all, is the association with its referent; and the sense
part of a word’s meaning contains the information needed to complete the association, and to suggest properties that the referent may have, whether it exists in
the real world or in the world of imagination.
Lexical Relations
Does he wear a turban, a fez or a hat?
Does he sleep on a mattress, a bed or a mat, or a Cot,
The Akond of Swat?
Can he write a letter concisely clear,
Without a speck or a smudge or smear or Blot,
The Akond of Swat?
EDWARD LEAR, “The Akond of Swat,” in Laughable Lyrics, 1877
Although no theory of word meaning is complete, we know that speakers
have considerable knowledge about the meaning relationships among different
words in their mental lexicons, and any theory must take that knowledge into
account.
Words are semantically related to one another in a variety of ways. The words
that describe these relations often end in the bound morpheme -nym. The bestknown lexical relations are synonyms, illustrated in the poem by Edward Lear,
and antonyms or opposites. Synonyms are words or expressions that have the
same meaning in some or all contexts. There are dictionaries of synonyms that
contain many hundreds of entries, such as:
apathetic/phlegmatic/passive/sluggish/indifferent
pedigree/ancestry/genealogy/descent/lineage
A sign in the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park states:
Please do not annoy, torment, pester, plague, molest, worry, badger, harry,
harass, heckle, persecute, irk, bullyrag, vex, disquiet, grate, beset, bother,
tease, nettle, tantalize, or ruffle the animals.
It has been said that there are no perfect synonyms—that is, no two words
ever have exactly the same meaning. Still, the following two sentences have very
similar meanings:
He’s sitting on the sofa. / He’s sitting on the couch.
During the French Norman occupation of England that began in 1066 c.e.,
many French words of Latin origin were imported into English. As a result,
English contains many synonymous pairs consisting of a word with an English
(or Germanic) root, and another with a Latin root, such as:
Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings)
English
Latin
manly
heal
send
go down
virile
recuperate
transmit
descend
Words that are opposite in meaning are antonyms. There are several kinds of
antonymy. There are complementary pairs:
alive/dead
present/absent awake/asleep
They are complementary in that alive = not dead and dead = not alive, and so
on.
There are gradable pairs of antonyms:
big/small
hot/cold
fast/slow
happy/sad
The meaning of adjectives in gradable pairs is related to the object they modify.
The words do not provide an absolute scale. For example, we know that “a
small elephant” is much bigger than “a large mouse.” Fast is faster when applied
to an airplane than to a car.
Another characteristic of certain pairs of gradable antonyms is that one is
marked and the other unmarked. The unmarked member is the one used in questions of degree. We ask, ordinarily, “How high is the mountain?” (not “How low
is it?”). We answer “Ten thousand feet high” but never “Ten thousand feet low,”
except humorously or ironically. Thus high is the unmarked member of high/
low. Similarly, tall is the unmarked member of tall/short, fast the unmarked
member of fast/slow, and so on.
Another kind of opposite involves pairs like
give/receive
buy/sell
teacher/pupil
They are called relational opposites, and they display symmetry in their meaning. If X gives Y to Z, then Z receives Y from X. If X is Y’s teacher, then Y is
X’s pupil. Pairs of words ending in -er and -ee are usually relational opposites. If
Mary is Bill’s employer, then Bill is Mary’s employee.
Some words are their own antonyms. These “autoantonyms” or “contranyms”
are words such as cleave “to split apart” or “to cling together” and dust “to
remove something” or “to spread something,” as in dusting furniture or dusting
crops. Antonymic pairs that are pronounced the same but spelled differently are
similar to autoantonyms: raise and raze are one such pair.
In English there are several ways to form antonyms. You can add the prefix
un-:
likely/unlikely
able/unable
fortunate/unfortunate
or you can add non-:
entity/nonentity
conformist/nonconformist
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or you can add in-:
tolerant/intolerant
discreet/indiscreet
decent/indecent
These strategies occasionally backfire, however. Pairs such as loosen and
unloosen; flammable and inflammable; valuable and invaluable, and a few
other “antiautonyms” actually have the same or nearly the same meaning,
despite looking like antonyms.
Other lexical relations include homonyms, polysemy, and hyponyms.
Rhymes With Orange (105945) © Hilary B. Price. King Features Syndicate
Words like bear and bare are homonyms (also called homophones). Homonyms are words that have different meanings but are pronounced the same,
and may or may not be spelled the same. (They’re homographs when spelled
the same, but when homographs are pronounced differently like pussy meaning
“infected” or pussy meaning “kitten,” they are called heteronyms rather than
homonyms.) Near nonsense sentences like Entre nous, the new gnu knew nu is a
Greek letter tease us with homonyms. The humor in the cartoon above is based
on the homonyms walk and wok.
Homonyms can create ambiguity. The sentence:
I’ll meet you by the bank.
may mean “I’ll meet you by the financial institution” or “I’ll meet you by the
riverside.”
Homonyms are good candidates for confusion as well as humor, as illustrated
in the following passage from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
“How is bread made?”
“I know that!” Alice cried eagerly.
“You take some flour—”
“Where do you pick the flower?” the White Queen asked. “In a garden, or
in the hedges?”
Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings)
“Well, it isn’t picked at all,” Alice explained; “it’s ground—”
“How many acres of ground?” said the White Queen.
The confusion and humor is based on the different sets of homonyms: flower
and flour and the two meanings of ground. Alice means ground as the past tense
of grind, whereas the White Queen is interpreting ground to mean “earth.”
When a word has multiple meanings that are related conceptually or historically, it is said to be polysemous (polly-seamus). For example, the word diamond
referring to a geometric shape and also to a baseball field that has that shape is
polysemous. Open a dictionary of English to any page and you will find words
with more than one definition (e.g., guard, finger, overture). Each of these words
is polysemous because each has several related meanings.
Speakers of English know that the words red, white, and blue are color words.
Similarly, lion, tiger, leopard, and lynx are all felines. Such sets of words are
called hyponyms. The relationship of hyponymy is between the more general
term such as color and the more specific instances of it, such as red. Thus red is a
hyponym of color, and lion is a hyponym of feline; or equivalently, color has the
hyponym red and feline has the hyponym lion.
Semantic Features
In the previous sections we discussed word meaning in relation to objects in
the world, and this permitted us to develop a truth-based semantics. We also
explored the meaning of words in relation to other words. But it is also possible
to look for a more basic set of semantic features or properties that are part of
word meanings and that reflect our knowledge about what words mean.
Decomposing the meanings of words into semantic features can clarify how
certain words relate to other words. For example, the basic property of antonyms
is that they share all but one semantic feature. We know that big and red are not
antonyms because they have too few semantic features in common. They are
both adjectives, but big has a semantic feature “about size,” whereas red has a
semantic feature “about color.” On the other hand, buy/sell are relational opposites because both contain a semantic feature like “change in possession,” differing only in the direction of the change.
Semantic features are among the conceptual elements that are part of the
meanings of words and sentence. Consider, for example, the sentence:
The assassin killed Thwacklehurst.
If the word assassin is in your mental dictionary, you know that it was some
person who murdered some important person named Thwacklehurst. Your
knowledge of the meaning of assassin tells you that an animal did not do the
killing, and that Thwacklehurst was not an average citizen. Knowledge of assassin includes knowing that the individual to whom that word refers is human, is a
murderer, and is a killer of important people. These bits of information are some
of the semantic features of the word on which speakers of the language agree.
The meaning of all nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs—the content words—
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and even some of the function words such as with and over can at least partially
be specified by such properties.
Evidence for Semantic Features
Semantic properties are not directly observable. Their existence must be inferred
from linguistic evidence. One source of such evidence is the speech errors, or
“slips of the tongue,” that we all produce. Consider the following unintentional
word substitutions that some speakers have actually spoken.
Intended Utterance
Actual Utterance (Error)
bridge of the nose
when my gums bled
he came too late
Mary was young
the lady with the Dachshund
that’s a horse of another color
his ancestors were farmers
he has to pay her alimony
bridge of the neck
when my tongues bled
he came too early
Mary was early
the lady with the Volkswagen
that’s a horse of another race
his descendants were farmers
he has to pay her rent
These errors, and thousands of others that have been collected and catalogued,
reveal that the incorrectly substituted words are not random but share some
semantic feature with the intended words. Nose, neck, gums, and tongues are
all “body parts” or “parts of the head.” Young, early, and late are related to
“time.” Dachshund and Volkswagen are both “German” and “small.” The common semantic features of color and race, ancestor and descendant, and alimony
and rent are apparent.
The semantic properties that describe the linguistic meaning of a word should
not be confused with other nonlinguistic properties, such as physical properties. Scientists know that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, but such
knowledge is not part of a word’s meaning. We know that water is an essential
ingredient of lemonade and baths. However, we don’t need to know any of these
things to know what the word water means, and to be able to use and understand it in a sentence.
Semantic Features and Grammar
Rhymes With Orange (105945) © Hilary B. Price. King Features Syndicate
Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings)
Further evidence that words are composed of smaller bits of meaning is that
semantic features interact with different aspects of the grammar such as morphology or syntax. These effects show up in both nouns and verbs.
Semantic Features of Nouns
The same semantic feature may be shared by many words. “Female” is a semantic feature, sometimes indicated by the suffix -ess, that makes up part of the
meaning of nouns, such as:
tigress
doe
ewe
hen
mare
vixen
aunt
debutante
girl
maiden
widow
woman
The words in the last two columns are also distinguished by the semantic feature
“human,” which is also found in:
doctor
bachelor
dean
parent
professor
baby
teenager
child
Another part of the meaning of the words baby and child is that they are
“young.” (We will continue to indicate words by using italics and semantic features by double quotes.) The word father has the properties “male” and “adult”
as do uncle and bachelor.
In some languages, though not English, nouns occur with classifiers, grammatical morphemes that indicate the semantic class of the noun. In Swahili a
noun that has the semantic feature “human” is prefixed with m- if singular and
wa- if plural, as in mtoto (child) and watoto (children). A noun that has the
feature “human artifact,” such as bed, chair, or knife, is prefixed with the classifiers ki if singular and vi if plural, for example, kiti (chair) and viti (chairs).
Semantic properties may have syntactic and semantic effects, too. For example, the kinds of determiners that a noun may occur with are controlled by
whether it is a “count” noun or a “mass” noun.
Consider these data:
I have two dogs.
I have a dog.
*I have dog.
He has many dogs.
*He has much dogs.
*I have two rice(s).
*I have a rice.
I have rice.
*He has many rice(s).
He has much rice.
Count nouns can be enumerated and pluralized—one potato, two potatoes.
They may be preceded by the indefinite determiner a, and by the quantifier many
as in many potatoes, but not by much, *much potato. They must also occur with
a determiner of some kind. Nouns such as rice, water, and milk, which cannot
be enumerated or pluralized, are mass nouns. They cannot be preceded by a or
many, and they can occur with the quantifier much or without any determiner
at all. The humor of the cartoon is based both on the ambiguity of toast and the
fact that as a food French toast is a mass noun, but as an oration it is a count
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noun. The count/mass distinction captures the fact that speakers know the properties that govern which determiner types go with different nouns. Without it we
could not describe these differences.
Generally, the count/mass distinction corresponds to the difference between
discrete objects and homogeneous substances. But it would be incorrect to say
that this distinction is grounded in human perception, because different languages may treat the same object differently. For example, in English the words
hair, furniture, and spaghetti are mass nouns. We say Some hair is curly, Much
furniture is poorly made, John loves spaghetti. In Italian, however, these words
are count nouns, as illustrated in the following sentences:
Ivano ha mangiato molti spaghetti ieri sera.
Ivano ate many spaghettis last evening.
Piero ha comprato un mobile.
Piero bought a furniture.
Luisella ha pettinato i suoi capelli.
Luisella combed her hairs.
We would have to assume a radical form of linguistic determinism (remember the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from chapter 6) to say that Italian and English
speakers have different perceptions of hair, furniture, and spaghetti. It is more
reasonable to assume that languages can differ to some extent in the semantic
features they assign to words with the same referent, somewhat independently
of the way they conceptualize that referent. Even within a particular language
we can have different words—count and mass—to describe the same object or
substance. For example, in English we have shoes (count) and footwear (mass),
coins (count) and change (mass).
Semantic Features of Verbs
Verbs also have semantic features as part of their meaning. For example, “cause”
is a feature of verbs such as darken, kill, uglify, and so on.
darken
kill
uglify
cause to become dark
cause to die
cause to become ugly
“Go” is a feature of verbs that mean a change in location or possession, such as
swim, crawl, throw, fly, give, or buy:
Jack swims.
The baby crawled under the table.
The boy threw the ball over the fence.
John gave Mary a beautiful engagement ring.
Words like swim have an additional feature like “in liquid,” while crawl is “close
to a surface.”
“Become” is a feature expressing the end state of the action of certain verbs.
For example, the verb break can be broken down into the following components
of meaning: “cause” to “become” broken.
Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings)
Verbal features, like features on nouns, may have syntactic consequences. For
example, verbs can either describe events, such as John kissed Mary/John ate
oysters, or states, such as John knows Mary/John likes oysters. The eventive/
stative difference is mirrored in the syntax. Eventive sentences still sound natural when passivized, when expressed progressively, when used imperatively, and
with certain adverbs:
Eventives
Mary was kissed by John.
John is kissing Mary.
Kiss Mary!
John deliberately kissed Mary.
Oysters were eaten by John.
John is eating oysters.
Eat oysters!
John deliberately ate oysters.
The stative sentences seem peculiar, if not ungrammatical or anomalous, when
cast in the same form. (The preceding “?” indicates the strangeness.)
Statives
?Mary is known by John.
?John is knowing Mary.
?Know Mary!
?John deliberately knows Mary.
?Oysters are liked by John.
?John is liking oysters.
?Like oysters!
?John deliberately likes oysters.
Negation is a particularly interesting component of the meaning of some
verbs. Expressions such as ever, anymore, have a red cent, and many more are
ungrammatical in certain simple affirmative sentences, but grammatical in corresponding negative ones.
*Mary will ever smile. (Cf. Mary will not ever smile.)
*I can visit you anymore. (Cf. I cannot visit you anymore.)
*It’s worth a red cent. (Cf. It’s not worth a red cent.)
Such expressions are called negative polarity items because a negative element
such as “not” elsewhere in the sentence allows them to appear. Consider these
data:
*John thinks that he’ll ever fly a plane again.
*John hopes that he’ll ever fly a plane again.
John doubts that he’ll ever fly a plane again.
John despairs that he’ll ever fly a plane again.
This suggests that verbs such as doubt and despair, but not think and hope, have
“negative” as a component of their meaning. Doubt may be analyzed as “think
that not,” and despair as “has no hope.” The negative feature in the verb allows
the negative polarity item ever to occur grammatically without the overt presence of not.
Argument Structure
Verbs differ in terms of the number and types of NPs they can take as complements. As we noted in chapter 2, transitive verbs such as find, hit, chase, and so
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on take, or c-select, a direct object complement, whereas intransitive verbs like
arrive or sleep do not. Ditransitive verbs such as give or throw take two object
complements as in John threw Mary a ball. In addition, most verbs take a subject. The various NPs that occur with a verb are its arguments. Thus intransitive
verbs have one argument: the subject; transitive verbs have two arguments: the
subject and direct object; ditransitive verbs have three arguments: the subject,
direct object, and indirect object. The argument structure of a verb is part of its
meaning and is included in its lexical entry.
The verb not only determines the number of arguments in a sentence, but it
also limits the semantic properties of both its subject and its complements. For
example, find and sleep require (s-select) animate subjects. The well-known colorless green ideas sleep furiously is semantically anomalous because ideas (colorless or not) are not animate. Components of a verb’s meaning can also be relevant
to the choice of complements it can take. For example, the verbs in (1) and (3) can
take two objects—they’re ditransitive—while those in (2) and (4) cannot.
1.
2.
3.
4.
John threw/tossed/kicked/flung the boy the ball.
*John pushed/pulled/lifted/hauled the boy the ball.
Mary faxed/radioed/e-mailed/phoned Helen the news.
*Mary murmured/mumbled/muttered/shrieked Helen the news.
Although all the verbs in (1) and (2) are verbs of motion, they differ in how the
force of the motion is applied: the verbs in (1) involve a single quick motion
whereas those in (2) involve a prolonged use of force. Similarly, the verbs in (3)
and (4) are all verbs of communication, but their meanings differ in the way the
message is communicated; those in (3) involve an external apparatus whereas
those in (4) involve the type of voice used. Finally, the ditransitive verbs have
“transfer direct object to indirect object” in their meaning. In (1) the ball is
transferred to the boy. In (3) the news is transferred, or leastwise transmitted,
to Helen. The ditransitive verbs give, write, send, and throw all have this property. Even when the transference is not overt, it may be inferred. In John baked
Mary a cake, there is an implied transfer of the cake from John to Mary. Subtle
aspects of meaning are mirrored in the argument structure of the verbs, and
indeed, this connection between form and meaning may help children acquire
the syntactic and semantic rules of their language, as will be discussed in chapter 7.
Thematic Roles
A feminine boy from Khartoum
Took a masculine girl to his room
They spent the whole night
In one hell of a fight
About who should do what—and to whom?
ANONYMOUS LIMERICK, quoted in More Limericks, G. Legman (ed.), 1977
Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings)
The NP arguments in the VP, which include the subject and any objects, are
semantically related in various ways to the verb. The relations depend on the
meaning of the particular verb. For example, the NP the boy in the sentence:
1.
The boy rolled a red ball.
agent
theme
is the “doer” of the rolling action, also called the agent. The NP a red ball is
the theme or the “undergoer” of the rolling action. Relations such as agent and
theme are called thematic roles. Thematic roles express the kind of relation that
holds between the arguments of the verb and the type of situation that the verb
describes.
A further example is the sentence:
2.
The boy threw the red ball to the girl.
agent
theme
goal
Here, the girl bears the thematic role of goal, that is, the endpoint of a change in
location or possession. The verb phrase is interpreted to mean that the theme of
throw ends up in the position of the goal.
Other thematic roles are source, where the action originates; instrument, the
means used to accomplish the action; and experiencer, one receiving sensory
input:
Professor Snape awakened Harry Potter with his wand.
source
experiencer
instrument
The particular thematic roles assigned by a verb can be traced back to components of the verb’s meaning. Verbs such as throw, buy, and fly contain a feature
“go” expressing a change in location or possession. The feature “go” is thus
linked to the presence of the thematic roles of theme, source, and goal. Verbs
like awaken or frighten have a feature “affects mental state” so that one of its
arguments takes on the thematic role of experiencer.
Thematic role assignment, or theta assignment, is also connected to syntactic
structure. In the sentence in (2) the role of theme is assigned to the direct object
the ball and the role of goal to the indirect object the girl. Verb pairs such as
sell and buy both involve the feature “go.” They are therefore linked to a thematic role of theme, which is assigned to the direct object, as in the following
sentences:
3. John sold the book to Mary.
agent
theme
goal
4.
Mary bought the book from John.
agent
theme
source
In addition, sell is linked to the presence of a goal (the recipient or endpoint of the
transfer), and buy to the presence of a source (the initiator of the transfer). Thus,
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buy/sell are relational opposites because both contain the semantic feature “go”
(the transfer of goods or services) and they differ only in the direction of transfer, that is, whether the indirect object is a source or goal. Thematic roles are not
assigned to arguments randomly. There is a connection between the meaning of
a verb and the syntactic structure of sentences containing the verb.
Our knowledge of verbs includes their syntactic category, which arguments
they select, and the thematic roles they assign to their arguments.
Thematic roles are the same in sentences that are paraphrases.
1.
2.
The dog bit the stick. / The stick was bitten by the dog.
The trainer gave the dog a treat. / The trainer gave a treat to the dog.
In (1) the dog is the agent and the stick is the theme. In (2) the treat is the theme
and the dog is the goal. This is because certain thematic roles must be assigned to
the same deep structure position, for example, theme is assigned to the object of
bit/bitten. This uniformity of theta assignment, a principle of Universal Grammar, dictates that the various thematic roles are always in their proper structural place in deep structure. Thus the stick in the passive sentence the stick was
bitten by the dog must have originated in object position and moved to subject
position by transformational rule:
__ was bitten the stick by the dog
d-structure
→
the stick was bitten __ by the dog
s-structure
Thematic roles may remain the same in sentences that are not paraphrases, as
in the following instances:
3.
4.
5.
The boy opened the door with the key.
The key opened the door.
The door opened.
In all three of these sentences, the door is the theme, the object that is opened.
Uniformity of theta assignment therefore entails that the door in the sentence in
(5) originates as the object of open and undergoes a movement rule, much like in
the passive example above.
___ opened the door
→
The door opened ___
Although the sentences in (3)–(5) are not strict paraphrases of one another,
they are structurally and semantically related in that they have similar deep
structure configurations.
In the sentences in (3) and (4), the key, despite its different positions, has the
thematic role of instrument suggesting greater structural flexibility for some thematic roles. The semantics of the three sentences is determined by the meaning
of the verb open and the rules that determine how thematic roles are assigned to
the verb’s arguments.
Pragmatics
Pragmatics
SHOE © 1991 MACNELLY. KING FEATURES SYNDICATE. Reprinted with permission.
Pragmatics is concerned with our understanding of language in context. Two
kinds of contexts are relevant. The first is linguistic context—the discourse that
precedes the phrase or sentence to be interpreted; the second is situational context—virtually everything nonlinguistic in the environment of the speaker.
Speakers know how to combine words and phrases to form sentences, and
they also know how to combine sentences into a larger discourse to express
complex thoughts and ideas. Discourse analysis is concerned with the broad
speech units comprising multiple sentences. It involves questions of style, appropriateness, cohesiveness, rhetorical force, topic/subtopic structure, differences
between written and spoken discourse, as well as grammatical properties.
Within a discourse, preceding sentences affect the meaning of sentences that
follow them in various ways. For example, the reference or meaning of pronouns
often depends on prior discourse. Prior discourse can also disambiguate words
like bank in that the discussion may be about rafting on a river or interest rates.
Situational context, on the other hand, is the nonlinguistic environment in
which a sentence or discourse happens. It is the context that allows speakers to
seamlessly, even unknowingly, interpret questions like Can you pass the salt? as
requests to carry out a certain action and not a simple question. Situational context includes the speaker, hearer, and any third parties present, along with their
beliefs and their beliefs about what the others believe. It includes the physical
environment, the social milieu, the subject of conversation, the time of day, and
so on, ad infinitum. Almost any imaginable extralinguistic factor may, under
appropriate circumstances, influence the way language is interpreted.
Pronouns provide a good way to illustrate the two kinds of contexts—linguistic and situational—that affect meaning.
Pronouns
Pronouns are lexical items that can get their meaning from other NPs in the
sentence or in the larger discourse. Any NP that a pronoun depends on for its
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meaning is called its antecedent. Pronouns are sensitive to syntax, discourse,
and situational context for their interpretation. We’ll take up syntactic matters
first.
Pronouns and Syntax
“Hi and Lois” © King Features Syndicate. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
There are different types of pronouns. Reflexive pronouns are pronouns such as
himself and themselves. In English, reflexive pronouns always depend on an NP
antecedent for their meaning and the antecedent must be in the same clause, as
illustrated in the following examples:
1.
2.
3.
Jane bit herself.
*Jane said that the boy bit herself.
*Herself left.
In (1) the NP Jane and the reflexive pronoun herself are in the same S; in (2)
herself is in the embedded sentence and is structurally too far from the antecedent Jane, resulting in the ungrammaticality. In (3) herself has no antecedent at
all, hence nothing to get its meaning from. The flouting of the rule that requires
reflexives to have antecedents gives rise to the humor in the cartoon.
Languages also have pronouns that are not reflexive, such as he, she, it, us,
him, her, you, and so on, which we will simply refer to as pronouns. Pronouns
also depend on other elements for their meaning, but the syntactic conditions
on pronouns are different from those on reflexives. Pronouns cannot refer to
an antecedent in the same clause, but they are free to refer to an NP outside
this clause, as illustrated in the following sentences (the underlining indicates
the interpretation in which the pronoun takes the NP (in this case, John) as
antecedent):
4.
5.
*John knows him.
John knows that he is a genius.
The sentence in (4) is ungrammatical relative to the interpretation because
him cannot mean John. (Compare John knows himself.) In (5), however, the pro-
Pragmatics
noun he can be interpreted as John. Notice that in both sentences it is possible
for the pronouns to refer to some other person not mentioned in the sentence
(e.g., Pete or Harry). In this case the pronoun gets its reference from the larger
discourse or nonlinguistic context.
Pronouns and Discourse
The 911 operator, trying to get a description of the gunman, asked, “What kind of clothes
does he have on?”
Mr. Morawski, thinking the question pertained to Mr. McClure [the victim, who lay dying
of a gunshot wound], answered, “He has a bloody shirt with blue jeans, purple striped
shirt.”
The 911 operator then gave police that description [the victim’s] of a gunman.
THE NEWS AND OBSERVER, Raleigh, North Carolina, January 21, 1989
Pronouns may be used to refer to entities previously mentioned in discourse or to
entities that are presumably known to the participants of a discourse. When that
presumption fails, miscommunication such as the one at the head of this section
may result.
In a discourse, prior linguistic context plays a primary role in pronoun interpretation. In the following discourse,
It seems that the man loves the woman.
Many people think he loves her.
the most natural interpretation of her is “the woman” referred to in the first
sentence, whoever she happens to be. But it is also possible for her to refer to a
different person, perhaps one indicated with a pointing gesture. In such a case
her would be spoken with added emphasis:
Many people think he loves her!
Similar remarks apply to the reference of he, which most naturally refers to the
man, but not necessarily so. Again, intonation and emphasis would provide
clues.
Referring to the previous discourse, strictly speaking, it would not be ungrammatical if the discourse went this way:
It seems that the man loves the woman.
Many people think the man loves the woman.
However, most of us would find that the discourse sounds stilted. Often in discourse, the use of pronouns is a stylistic decision, which is part of pragmatics.
Pronouns and Situational Context
When a pronoun gets its reference from an NP antecedent in the same sentence,
we say that the pronoun is bound to that noun phrase antecedent. If her in
1.
Mary thinks he loves her
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refers to “Mary,” it would be a bound pronoun. Pronouns can also be bound to
quantifier antecedents such as “every N'” as in the sentence:
2.
Every girl in the class hopes John will ask her out on a date.
In this case her refers to each one of the girls in the class and is said to be
bound to every girl. Reflexive pronouns are always bound. When a pronoun
refers to some entity outside the sentence or not explicitly mentioned in the discourse, it is said to be free or unbound. So, her in the sentences in (1) and (2)
need not be bound to Mary or to every girl and can also refer to some arbitrary
girl. The reference of a free pronoun must ultimately be determined by the situational context.
First- and second-person nonreflexive (I/we, you) pronouns are bound to the
speaker and hearer, respectively. They therefore depend on the situational context, namely, who is talking and who is listening. With third-person pronouns,
semantic rules permit them either to be bound or free, as noted above. The ultimate interpretation in any event is context-dependent.
Deixis
“Dennis the Menace” © Hank Ketcham. Reprinted with permission of North America Syndicate.
In all languages, the reference of certain words and expressions relies entirely
on the situational context of the utterance, and can only be understood in light
of these circumstances. This aspect of pragmatics is called deixis (pronounced
“dike-sis”). Pronouns are deictic. Their reference (or lack of same) is ultimately
context dependent.
Expressions such as
this person
that man
Pragmatics
these women
those children
are also deictic, because they require situational information for the listener to
make a referential connection and understand what is meant. These examples
illustrate person deixis. They also show that the demonstrative articles like this
and that are deictic.
We also have time deixis and place deixis. The following examples are all
deictic expressions of time:
now
this time
two weeks from now
then
that time
last week
tomorrow
seven days ago
next April
To understand what specific times such expressions refer to, we need to know
when the utterance was said. Clearly, next week has a different reference when
uttered today than a month from today. If you found an undated notice announcing a “BIG SALE NEXT WEEK,” you would not know whether the sale had
already taken place.
Expressions of place deixis require contextual information about the place of
the utterance, as shown by the following examples:
here
that place
this city
there
this ranch
these parks
this place
those towers over there
yonder mountains
The “Dennis the Menace” cartoon at the beginning of this section illustrates
the hilarity that may ensue if deictic expressions are misinterpreted.
Directional terms such as
before/behind
left/right
front/back
are deictic insofar as you need to know the orientation in space of the conversational participants to know their reference. In Japanese the verb kuru “come”
can only be used for motion toward the place of utterance. A Japanese speaker
cannot call up a friend and ask
May I kuru to your house?
as you might, in English, ask “May I come to your house?” The correct verb is
iku, “go,” which indicates motion away from the place of utterance. In Japanese
these verbs have a deictic aspect to their meaning.
Deixis, as we’ve seen, is a great source of humor. A cartoon shows a chicken
calling across the road to another chicken, “Hey, how do I cross to the other side
of the road?”
“You’re ON the other side,” the other chicken replies.
Deixis abounds in language use and marks one of the boundaries of semantics
and pragmatics. Deictic expressions such as I, an hour from now, and behind me
have meaning to the extent that their referents are determined in a regular way
as a function of the situation of use. (I, for example, picks out the speaker.) To
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complete their meaning, to determine their reference, it is necessary to know the
situational context.
More on Situational Context
Depending on inflection, ah bon [in French] can express shock, disbelief, indifference,
irritation, or joy.
PETER MAYLE, Toujours Provence, 1991
Much discourse is telegraphic. Verb phrases are not specifically mentioned, entire
clauses are left out, direct objects vanish, pronouns roam freely. Yet people still
understand one another, and part of the reason is that rules of grammar and rules
of discourse combine with contextual knowledge to fill in what’s missing and
make the discourse cohere. Much of the contextual knowledge is knowledge of
who is speaking, who is listening, what objects are being discussed, and general
facts about the world we live in—what we have been calling situational context.
Often what we say is not literally what we mean. When we ask at the dinner
table if someone “can pass the salt” we are not querying their ability to do so, we
are requesting that they do so. If I say “You’re standing on my foot,” I am not making idle conversation; I am asking you to stand elsewhere. We say “It’s cold in here”
to convey “Shut the window,” or “Turn up the heat,” or “Let’s leave,” or a dozen
other things that depend on the real-world situation at the time of speaking.
In the following sections, we will look at several ways that real-world context
influences and interacts with meaning.
Maxims of Conversation
Polonius: Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, c. 1600
Speakers recognize when a series of sentences “hangs together” or when it is
disjointed. The following discourse (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II), which gave rise to
Polonius’s remark, does not seem quite right—it is not coherent.
polonius:
hamlet:
polonius:
hamlet:
polonius:
hamlet:
What do you read, my lord?
Words, words, words.
What is the matter, my lord?
Between who?
I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here that old men have
gray beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging
thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful
lack of wit, together with most weak hams: all which, sir,
though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not
honesty to have it thus set down; for yourself, sir, should grow
old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.
Hamlet, who is feigning insanity, refuses to answer Polonius’s questions “in
good faith.” He has violated certain conversational conventions, or maxims
Pragmatics
of conversation. These maxims were first discussed by the British philosopher
H. Paul Grice and are sometimes called Gricean Maxims. One such maxim, the
maxim of quantity, states that a speaker’s contribution to the discourse should
be as informative as is required—neither more nor less. Hamlet has violated this
maxim in both directions. In answering “Words, words, words” to the question
of what he is reading, he is providing too little information. His final remark
goes to the other extreme in providing too much information.
Hamlet also violates the maxim of relevance when he “misinterprets” the
question about the reading matter as a matter between two individuals.
The run-on nature of Hamlet’s final remark, a violation of the maxim of
manner, is another source of incoherence. This effect is increased in the final
sentence by the somewhat bizarre metaphor that compares growing younger
with walking backward, a violation of the maxim of quality, which requires
sincerity and truthfulness.
Here is a summary of the four conversational maxims, parts of the broad
cooperative principle.
Name of Maxim
Description of Maxim
Quantity
Relevance
Manner
Quality
Say neither more nor less than the discourse requires.
Be relevant.
Be brief and orderly; avoid ambiguity and obscurity.
Do not lie; do not make unsupported claims.
Unless speakers (like Hamlet) are being deliberately uncooperative, they
adhere to these maxims and to other conversational principles, and assume others do too.
Bereft of context, if one man says (truthfully) to another “I have never slept
with your wife,” that would be provocative because the very topic of conversation should be unnecessary, a violation of the maxim of quantity.
Asking an able-bodied person at the dinner table “Can you pass the salt?”, if
answered literally, would force the responder into stating the obvious, also a violation of the maxim of quantity. To avoid this, the person asked seeks a reason
for the question, and deduces that the asker would like to have the salt shaker.
The maxim of relevance explains how saying “It’s cold in here” to a person
standing by an open window might be interpreted as a request to close it, or else
why make the remark to that particular person in the first place?
For sentences like I am sorry that the team lost to be relevant, it must be true
that “the team lost.” Else why say it? Situations that must exist for utterances
to be appropriate are called presuppositions. Questions like Have you stopped
hugging your border collie? presuppose that you hugged your border collie, and
statements like The river Avon runs through Stratford presuppose the existence
of the river and the town. The presuppositions prevent violations of the maxim
of relevance. When presuppositions are ignored, we get the confusion in this
passage from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take
more.”
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“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “It’s very easy to take more
than nothing.”
Utterances like Take some more tea or Have another beer carry the presupposition that one has already had some. The March Hare is oblivious to this
aspect of language, of which the annoyed Alice is keenly aware.
Presuppositions are different from entailments in that they are felicity conditions taken for granted by speakers adhering to the cooperative principle. Unlike
entailments, they remain when the sentence is negated. I am not sorry that the
team lost still presupposes that the team lost. On the other hand, while John
killed Bill entails Bill died, no such entailment follows from John did not kill
Bill.
Conversational conventions such as these allow the various sentence meanings to be sensibly combined into discourse meaning and integrated with context, much as rules of sentence grammar allow word meanings to be sensibly
(and grammatically) combined into sentence meaning.
Implicatures
What does “yet” mean, after all? “I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet.” What does that mean?
It means you’re going to go, doesn’t it?
NICK HORNBY, High Fidelity, 1995
In conversation we sometimes infer or conclude based not only on what was
said, but also on assumptions about what the speaker is trying to achieve. In the
examples just discussed—It’s cold in here, Can you please pass the salt, and I
have never slept with your wife—the person spoken to derives a meaning that
is not the literal meaning of the sentences. In the first case he assumes that he
is being asked to close the window; in the second case he knows he’s not being
questioned but rather asked to pass the salt; and in the third case he will understand exactly the opposite of what is said, namely that the speaker has slept with
his wife.
Such inferences are known as implicatures. Implicatures are deductions that
are not made strictly on the basis of the content expressed in the discourse.
Rather, they are made in accordance with the conversational maxims, taking
into account both the linguistic meaning of the utterance as well as the particular circumstances in which the utterance is made.
Consider the following conversation:
speaker a:
speaker b:
Smith doesn’t have any girlfriends these days.
He’s been driving over to the West End a lot lately.
The implicature is that Smith has a girlfriend in the West End. The reasoning
is that B’s answer would be irrelevant unless it contributed information related
to A’s question. We assume speakers try to be cooperative. So it is fair to conclude that B uttered the second sentence because the reason that Smith drives to
the West End is that he has a girlfriend there.
Pragmatics
Because implicatures are derived on the basis of assumptions about the
speaker that might turn out to be wrong, they can be easily cancelled. For this
reason A could have responded as follows:
speaker a:
He goes to the West End to visit his mother who is ill.
Although B’s utterance implies that the reason Smith goes to the West End is to
visit his girlfriend, A’s response cancels this implicature.
Implicatures are different than entailments. An entailment cannot be cancelled; it is logically necessary. Implicatures are also different than presuppositions. They are the possible consequences of utterances in their context, whereas
presuppositions are situations that must exist for utterances to be appropriate in
context, in other words, to obey Grice’s Maxims. Further world knowledge may
cancel an implicature, but the utterances that led to it remain sensible and wellformed, whereas further world knowledge that negates a presupposition—oh,
the team didn’t lose after all—renders the entire utterance inappropriate and in
violation of Grice’s Maxims.
Speech Acts
“Zits” © Zits Partnership. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
You can use language to do things. You can use language to make promises,
lay bets, issue warnings, christen boats, place names in nomination, offer congratulations, or swear testimony. The theory of speech acts describes how this
is done.
By saying I warn you that there is a sheepdog in the closet, you not only say
something, you warn someone. Verbs like bet, promise, warn, and so on are performative verbs. Using them in a sentence (in the first person, present tense) adds
something extra over and above the statement.
There are hundreds of performative verbs in every language. The following
sentences illustrate their usage:
I bet you five dollars the Yankees win.
I challenge you to a match.
I dare you to step over this line.
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I fine you $100 for possession of oregano.
I move that we adjourn.
I nominate Batman for mayor of Gotham City.
I promise to improve.
I resign!
I pronounce you husband and wife.
In all of these sentences, the speaker is the subject (i.e., the sentences are in first
person), who by uttering the sentence is accomplishing some additional action,
such as daring, nominating, or resigning. In addition, all of these sentences are
affirmative, declarative, and in the present tense. They are typical performative
sentences.
An informal test to see whether a sentence contains a performative verb is to
begin it with the words I hereby. . . . Only performative sentences sound right
when begun this way. Compare I hereby apologize to you with the somewhat
strange I hereby know you. The first is generally taken as an act of apologizing.
In all of the examples given, insertion of hereby would be acceptable.
In studying speech acts, the importance of context is evident. In some situations Band practice, my house, 6 to 8 is a reminder, but the same sentence
may be a warning in a different context. We call this underlying purpose of
the utterance—be it a reminder, a warning, a promise, a threat, or whatever—
the illocutionary force of a speech act. Because the illocutionary force of a
speech act depends on the context of the utterance, speech act theory is a part
of pragmatics.
Summary
Knowing a language means knowing how to produce and understand the
meaning of infinitely many sentences. The study of linguistic meaning is called
semantics. Lexical semantics is concerned with the meanings of morphemes and
words; compositional semantics with phrases and sentences. The study of how
context affects meaning is called pragmatics.
Speakers’ knowledge of sentence meaning includes knowing the truth conditions of declarative sentences; knowing when one sentence entails another sentence; knowing when two sentences are paraphrases or contradictory; knowing
when a sentence is a tautology, contradiction, or paradox; and knowing when
sentences are ambiguous, among other things. Compositional semantics is the
building up of phrasal or sentence meaning from the meaning of smaller units
by means of semantic rules.
There are cases when the meaning of larger units does not follow from the
meaning of its parts. Anomaly is when the pieces do not fit sensibly together, as
in colorless green ideas sleep furiously; metaphors are sentences that appear to
be anomalous, but to which a meaningful concept can be attached, such as time
is money; idioms are fixed expressions whose meaning is not compositional but
rather must be learned as a whole unit, such as kick the bucket meaning “to
die.”
Part of the meaning of words may be the association with the objects the
words refer to (if any), called reference, but often there is additional meaning
Summary
beyond reference, which is called sense. The reference of the President is Barack
Obama, and the sense of the expression is “highest executive office.” Some
expressions have reference but little sense such as proper names, and some have
sense but no reference such as the present king of France.
Words are related in various ways. They may be synonyms, various kinds of
antonyms such as gradable pairs and relational opposites, or homonyms, words
pronounced the same but with different meanings such as bare and bear.
Part of the meaning of words may be described by semantic features such
as “female,” “young,” “cause,” or “go.” Nouns may have the feature “count,”
wherein they may be enumerated (one potato, two potatoes), or “mass,” in which
enumeration may require contextual interpretation (*one milk, *two milks, perhaps meaning “one glass or quart or portion of milk”). Some verbs have the
feature of being “eventive” while others are “stative.” The semantic feature of
negation is found in many words and is evidenced by the occurrence of negative
polarity items (e.g., John doubts that Mary gives a hoot, but *John thinks that
Mary gives a hoot).
Verbs have various argument structures, which describe the NPs that may
occur with particular verbs. For example, intransitive verbs take only an NP
subject, whereas ditransitive verbs take an NP subject, an NP direct object, and
an NP indirect object. Thematic roles describe the semantic relations between a
verb and its NP arguments. Some thematic roles are agent: the doer of an action;
theme: the recipient of an action; and goal, source, instrument, and experiencer.
The principle of uniformity of theta assignment dictates that thematic roles must
be assigned to particular structural position (e.g., theme to object position) illustrating that there is a close connection between syntax and semantics. The general study of how context affects linguistic interpretation is pragmatics. Context
may be linguistic—what was previously spoken or written—or knowledge of the
world, including the speech situation, what we’ve called situational context.
Discourse consists of several sentences, including exchanges between speakers. Pragmatics is important when interpreting discourse, for example, in determining whether a pronoun in one sentence has the same referent as a noun
phrase in another sentence.
Deictic terms such as you, there, now, and the other side require knowledge
of the situation (person spoken to, place, time, spatial orientation) of the utterance to be interpreted referentially.
Speakers of all languages adhere to various cooperative principles for communicating sincerely called maxims of conversation. Such maxims as “be relevant” or “say neither more nor less than the discourse requires” permit a person
to interpret It’s cold in here as “Shut the windows” or “Turn up the thermostat.” Implicatures are the inferences that may be drawn from an utterance in
context. When Mary says It’s cold in here, one of many possible implicatures
may be “Mary wants the heat turned up.” Implicatures are like entailments in
that their truth follows from sentences of the discourse, but unlike entailments,
which are necessarily true, implicatures may be cancelled by information added
later. Mary might wave you away from the thermostat and ask you to hand her
a sweater. Presuppositions are situations that must be true for utterances to be
appropriate, so that Take some more tea has the presupposition “already had
some tea.”
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The theory of speech acts tells us that people use language to do things such
as lay bets, issue warnings, or nominate candidates. By using the words “I nominate Bill Smith,” you may accomplish an act of nomination that allows Bill
Smith to run for office. Verbs that “do things” are called performative verbs.
The speaker’s intent in making an utterance is known as illocutionary force. In
the case of performative verbs, the illocutionary force is mentioned overtly. In
other cases it must be determined from context.
References for Further Reading
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Chierchia, G., and S. McConnell-Ginet. 2000. Meaning and grammar, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Davidson, D., and G. Harman, eds. 1972. Semantics of natural languages. Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Reidel.
Fraser, B. 1995. An introduction to pragmatics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
Green, G. M. 1989. Pragmatics and natural language understanding. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Grice, H. P. 1989. Logic and conversation. Reprinted in Studies in the way of words.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jackendoff, R. 1993. Patterns in the mind. New York: HarperCollins.
______. 1983. Semantics and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the
mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. 2003. Metaphors we live by, 2nd edn. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Lyons, J. 1995. Linguistic semantics: An introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Mey, J. L. 2001. Pragmatics: An introduction, 2nd edn. Oxford, UK: Blackwell
Publishers.
Saeed, J. 2003. Semantics, 2nd edn. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Exercises
1. (This exercise requires knowledge of elementary set theory.)
A. Suppose that the reference (meaning) of swims points out the set of
individuals consisting of Anna, Lu, Paul, and Benjamin. For which of
the following sentences are the truth conditions produced by Semantic
Rule I met?
i. Anna swims.
ii. Jack swims.
iii. Benjamin swims.
B. Suppose the reference (meaning) of loves points out the set consisting
of the following pairs of individuals: <Anna, Paul>, <Paul, Benjamin>,
Exercises
<Benjamin, Benjamin>, <Paul, Anna>. According to Semantic Rule II,
what is the meaning of the verb phrase:
i. loves Paul
ii. loves Benjamin
iii. loves Jack
C. Given the information in (B), for which of the following sentences are
the truth conditions produced by Semantic Rule I met?
i. Paul loves Anna.
ii. Benjamin loves Paul.
iii. Benjamin loves himself.
iv. Anna loves Jack.
D. Challenge exercise: Consider the sentence Jack kissed Laura. How
would the actions of Semantic Rules (I) and (II) determine that the sentence is false if it were true that:
i. Nobody kissed Laura.
How about if it were true that:
ii. Jack did not kiss Laura, although other men did.
2. The following sentences are either tautologies (analytic), contradictions, or
situationally true or false. Write T by the tautologies, C by the contradictions, and S by the other sentences.
a. Queens are monarchs.
b. Kings are female.
c. Kings are poor.
d. Queens are ugly.
e. Queens are mothers.
f. Kings are mothers.
g. Dogs are four-legged.
h. Cats are felines.
i. Cats are stupid.
j. Dogs are carnivores.
k. George Washington is George Washington.
l. George Washington is the first president.
m. George Washington is male.
n. Uncles are male.
o. My aunt is a man.
p. Witches are wicked.
q. My brother is a witch.
r. My sister is an only child.
s. The evening star isn’t the evening star.
t. The evening star isn’t Venus.
u. Babies are adults.
v. Babies can lift one ton.
w. Puppies are human.
x. My bachelor friends are all married.
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y. My bachelor friends are all lonely.
z. Colorless ideas are green.
3. You are in a village in which every man must be shaved, and in which the
lone (male) barber shaves all and only the men who do not shave themselves. Formulate a paradox based on this situation.
4. Should the semantic component of the grammar account for whatever a
speaker means when uttering any meaningful expression? Defend your
viewpoint.
5. A. The following sentences may be lexically or structurally ambiguous,
or both. Provide paraphrases showing that you comprehend all the
meanings.
Example: I saw him walking by the bank.
Meaning 1: I saw him and he was walking by the bank of the river.
Meaning 2: I saw him and he was walking by the financial institution.
Meaning 3: I was walking by the bank of the river when I saw him.
Meaning 4: I was walking by the financial institution when I saw him.
a. We laughed at the colorful ball.
b. He was knocked over by the punch.
c. The police were urged to stop drinking by the fifth.
d. I said I would file it on Thursday.
e. I cannot recommend visiting professors too highly.
f. The license fee for pets owned by senior citizens who have not been
altered is $1.50. (Actual notice)
g. What looks better on a handsome man than a tux? Nothing!
(Attributed to Mae West)
h. Wanted: Man to take care of cow that does not smoke or drink.
(Actual notice)
i. For Sale: Several old dresses from grandmother in beautiful condition. (Actual notice)
j. Time flies like an arrow. (Hint: There are at least four paraphrases,
but some of them require imagination.)
B. Do the same thing for the following newspaper headlines:
k. POLICE BEGIN CAMPAIGN TO RUN DOWN JAYWALKERS
l. DRUNK GETS NINE MONTHS IN VIOLIN CASE
m. FARMER BILL DIES IN HOUSE
n. STUD TIRES OUT
o. SQUAD HELPS DOG BITE VICTIM
p. LACK OF BRAINS HINDERS RESEARCH
q. MINERS REFUSE TO WORK AFTER DEATH
r. EYE DROPS OFF SHELF
s. JUVENILE COURT TO TRY SHOOTING DEFENDANT
t. QUEEN MARY HAVING BOTTOM SCRAPED
6. Explain the semantic ambiguity of the following sentences by providing
two or more sentences that paraphrase the multiple meanings. Example:
Exercises
“She can’t bear children” can mean either “She can’t give birth to children”
or “She can’t tolerate children.”
a. He waited by the bank.
b. Is he really that kind?
c. The proprietor of the fish store was the sole owner.
d. The long drill was boring.
e. When he got the clear title to the land, it was a good deed.
f. It takes a good ruler to make a straight line.
g. He saw that gasoline can explode.
h. You should see her shop.
i. Every man loves a woman.
j. You get half off the cost of your hotel room if you make your own bed.
k. “It’s his job to lose” (said the coach about his new player).
l. Challenge exercise: Bill wants to marry a Norwegian woman.
7.
Go on an idiom hunt. In the course of some hours in which you converse or
overhear conversations, write down all the idioms that are used. If you prefer, watch soap operas or something similar for an hour or two and write
down the idioms. Show your parents (or whomever) this book when they
find you watching TV and you claim you’re doing your homework.
8. Take a half dozen or so idioms from exercise 7, or elsewhere, and try to
find their source, and if you cannot, speculate imaginatively on the source.
For example, sell down the river meaning “betray” arose from American
slave traders selling slaves from more northern states along the Mississippi River to the harsher southern states. For snap out of it, meaning “pay
attention” or “get in a better mood,” we (truly) speculate that ill-behaving
persons were once confined in a straight-jacket secured by snaps, and to
snap out of it meant the person was behaving better.
9.
For each group of words given as follows, state what semantic property
or properties distinguish between the classes of (a) words and (b) words.
If asked, also indicate a semantic property that the (a) words and the (b)
words share.
Example:
(a) widow, mother, sister, aunt, maid
(b) widower, father, brother, uncle, valet
The (a) and (b) words are “human.”
The (a) words are “female” and the (b) words are “male.”
a. (a) bachelor, man, son, paperboy, pope, chief
(b) bull, rooster, drake, ram
The (a) and (b) words are:
The (a) words are:
The (b) words are:
b. (a) table, stone, pencil, cup, house, ship, car
(b) milk, alcohol, rice, soup, mud
The (a) words are:
The (b) words are:
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CHAPTER 3 The Meaning of Language
c. (a) book, temple, mountain, road, tractor
(b) idea, love, charity, sincerity, bravery, fear
The (a) words are:
The (b) words are:
d. (a) pine, elm, ash, weeping willow, sycamore
(b) rose, dandelion, aster, tulip, daisy
The (a) and (b) words are:
The (a) words are:
The (b) words are:
e. (a) book, letter, encyclopedia, novel, notebook, dictionary
(b) typewriter, pencil, pen, crayon, quill, charcoal, chalk
The (a) words are:
The (b) words are:
f. (a) walk, run, skip, jump, hop, swim
(b) fly, skate, ski, ride, cycle, canoe, hang-glide
The (a) and (b) words are:
The (a) words are:
The (b) words are:
g. (a) ask, tell, say, talk, converse
(b) shout, whisper, mutter, drawl, holler
The (a) and (b) words are:
The (a) words are:
The (b) words are:
h. (a) absent–present, alive–dead, asleep–awake, married–single
(b) big–small, cold–hot, sad–happy, slow–fast
The (a) and (b) word pairs are:
The (a) words are:
The (b) words are:
i. (a) alleged, counterfeit, false, putative, accused
(b) red, large, cheerful, pretty, stupid
(Hint: Is an alleged murderer always a murderer? Is a pretty girl always
a girl?)
The (a) words are:
The (b) words are:
10. Research project: There are many -nym/-onym words that describe classes
of words with particular semantic properties. We mentioned a few in this
chapter such as synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, and hyponyms. What is
the etymology of -onym? What common English word is it related to? How
many more -nym words and their meaning can you come up with? Try for
five or ten on your own. With help from the Internet, dozens are possible.
(Hint: One such -nym word was the winning word in the 1997 Scripps
National Spelling Bee.)
11. There are several kinds of antonymy. By writing a c, g, or r in column C,
indicate whether the pairs in columns A and B are complementary, gradable, or relational opposites.
Exercises
A
B
C
good
expensive
parent
beautiful
false
lessor
pass
hot
legal
larger
poor
fast
asleep
husband
rude
bad
cheap
offspring
ugly
true
lessee
fail
cold
illegal
smaller
rich
slow
awake
wife
polite
___
___
___
___
___
___
___
___
___
___
___
___
___
___
___
12. For each definition, write in the first blank the word that has that meaning
and in the second (and third if present) a differently spelled homonym that
has a different meaning. The first letter of the words is provided.
Example: “A pair”: t(wo) t(oo) t(o)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
“Naked”:
“Base metal”:
“Worships”:
“Eight bits”:
“One of five senses”:
“Several couples”:
b_______
l_______
p_______
b_______
s_______
p_______
b_______
l_______
p_______
b_______
s_______
p_______
p_______
b_______
c_______
p_______
g.
h.
i.
j.
“Not pretty”:
“Purity of gold unit”:
“A horse’s coiffure”:
“Sets loose”:
p_______
k_______
m_______
f_______
p_______
c_______
m_______
f_______
M_______
f_______
13. Here are some proper names of U.S. restaurants. Can you figure out the
basis for the name? (This is for fun—don’t let yourself be graded.)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
Mustard’s Last Stand
Aunt Chilada’s
Lion on the Beach
Pizza Paul and Mary
Franks for the Memories
Weiner Take All
Dressed to Grill
Deli Beloved
Gone with the Wings
Aunt Chovy’s Pizza
Polly Esther’s
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l. Dewey, Cheatham & Howe
(Hint: This is also the name of a made-up law firm noted in chapter 6.)
m. Thai Me Up Café (truly—it’s in L.A.)
n. Romancing the Cone
14. The following sentences consist of a verb, its noun phrase subject, and various complements and prepositional phrases. Identify the thematic role of
each NP by writing the letter a, t, i, s, g, or e above the noun, standing for
agent, theme, instrument, source, goal, and experiencer.
a
t
s
i
Example: The boy took the books from the cupboard with a handcart.
a. Mary found a ball.
b. The children ran from the playground to the wading pool.
c. One of the men unlocked all the doors with a paper clip.
d. John melted the ice with a blowtorch.
e. Helen looked for a cockroach.
f. Helen saw a cockroach.
g. Helen screamed.
h. The ice melted.
i. With a telescope, the boy saw the man.
j. The farmer loaded hay onto the truck.
k. The farmer loaded the hay with a pitchfork.
l. The hay was loaded on the truck by the farmer.
m. Helen heard music coming out of the speaker.
15. Find a complete version of “The Jabberwocky” from Through the
Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. There are some on the Internet. Look up
all the nonsense words in a good dictionary (also to be found online) and
see how many of them are lexical items in English. Note their meanings.
16. In sports and games, many expressions are “performative.” By shouting
You’re out, the first base umpire performs an act. Think up half a dozen or
so similar examples and explain their use.
17. A criterion of a performative utterance is whether you can begin it with “I
hereby.” Notice that if you say sentence (a) aloud, it sounds like a genuine
apology, but to say sentence (b) aloud sounds funny because you cannot
willfully perform an act of recognition:
a. I hereby apologize to you.
b. ?I hereby recognize you.
Determine which of the following are performative sentences by inserting
“hereby” and seeing whether they sound right.
c. I testify that she met the agent.
d. I know that she met the agent.
e. I suppose the Yankees will win.
f. He bet her $2,500 that Bush would win.
g. I dismiss the class.
Exercises
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
m.
I teach the class.
We promise to leave early.
I owe the IRS $1 million.
I bequeath $1 million to the IRS.
I swore I didn’t do it.
I swear I didn’t do it.
18. A. Explain, in terms of Grice’s Maxims, the humor or strangeness of the
following exchange between mother and child. The child has just finished eating a cookie when the mother comes into the room.
mother: What are these cookie crumbs doing in your bed?
child:
Nothing, they’re just lying there.
B. Do the same for this “exchange” between an owner and her cat:
owner:
cat:
If cats ruled the world, everyone would sleep on a pile of
fresh laundry.
Cats don’t rule the world??
19. Spend an hour or two observing conversations between people, including yourself if you wish, where the intended meanings of utterances are
mediated by Grice’s Maxims. For example, someone says “I didn’t quite
catch that,” with the possible meaning of “Please say it again,” or “Please
speaker a little louder.” Record five (or more if you’re having fun) such
instances, and the maxim or maxims involved. In the above example, we
would cite the maxims of relevance and quantity.
20. Consider the following “facts” and then answer the questions.
Part A illustrates your ability to interpret meanings when syntactic rules
have deleted parts of the sentence; Part B illustrates your knowledge of
semantic features and entailment; Parts C and D illustrate implicatures.
A. Roses are red and bralkions are too.
Booth shot Lincoln and Czolgosz, McKinley.
Casca stabbed Caesar and so did Cinna.
Frodo was exhausted as was Sam.
i. What color are bralkions?
ii. What did Czolgosz do to McKinley?
iii. What did Cinna do to Caesar?
iv. What did Sam feel?
B. Now consider these facts and answer the questions:
Black Beauty was a stallion.
Mary is a widow.
John pretended to send Martha a birthday card.
Jane didn’t remember to send Tom a birthday card.
Tina taught her daughter to swim.
My boss managed to give me a raise last year.
Flipper is walking.
(T = true; F = false)
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v.
Black Beauty was male.
T ___
F ___
vi.
Mary was never married.
T ___
F ___
vii. John sent Martha a card.
T ___
F ___
viii. Jane sent Tom a card.
T ___
F ___
ix.
Tina’s daughter can swim.
T ___
F ___
x.
I didn’t get a raise last year.
T ___
F ___
xi.
Flipper has legs.
T ___
F ___
C. Based on information in A and B, make possible true/false decisions on
the following:
i.
Czolgosz is an assassin.
T ___
F ___
ii.
Sam was breathing hard.
T ___
F ___
iii.
Mary is not young.
T ___
F ___
iv.
John is dishonest.
T ___
F ___
v.
Jane is inconsiderate.
T ___
F ___
vi.
Tina is a lousy mother.
T ___
F ___
vii. I hate my boss.
T ___
F ___
viii. Flipper is a fish.
T ___
F ___
D. For each case in C, provide further information that cancels the implicature. E.g., in (a) we further learn that Czolgosz killed his unprepossessing neighbor Morris McKinley who had recently retired from
the railroad. Thus Czolgosz is not an assassin but merely a common
murderer.
21. The following sentences have certain presuppositions that ensure their
appropriateness. What are they?
Example: The minors promised the police to stop drinking.
Presupposition: The minors were drinking.
a. We went to the ballpark again.
b. Valerie regretted not receiving a new T-bird for Labor Day.
c. That her pet turtle ran away made Emily very sad.
d. The administration forgot that the professors support the students.
e. It is an atrocity that the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001.
f. It isn’t tolerable that the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001.
g. Disa wants more popcorn.
h. Mary drank one more beer before leaving.
i. Jack knows who discovered Pluto in 1930.
j. Mary was horrified to find a cockroach in her bed.
22. Circle any deictic expression in the following sentences. (Hint: Proper
names and noun phrases that contain the definite article the are not considered deictic expressions.)
a. I saw her standing there.
b. Dogs are animals.
c. Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.
d. The name of that rock band is “The Beatles.”
Exercises
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776.
The Declaration of Independence was signed last year.
Copper conducts electricity.
The treasure chest is to your right.
These are the times that try men’s souls.
There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to
fortune.
23. State for each pronoun in the following sentences whether it is free, bound,
or either bound or free. Consider each sentence independently.
Example:
John finds himself in love with her.
himself—bound; her—free
Example:
John said that he loved her.
he—bound or free; her—free
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
Louise said to herself in the mirror: “She’s so ugly.”
The fact that he considers her pretty pleases Maria.
Whenever she sees it, she thinks of herself.
John discovered that a picture of himself was hanging in the post office,
and that fact bugged him, but it pleased her.
It seems that she and he will never stop arguing with them.
Persons are prohibited from picking flowers from any but their own
graves. (On a sign in a cemetery)
Everybody who worked on the campaign hoped the candidate would
give him a job.
John thinks he is a good cook.
Challenge exercise: In the following sentence there is an expressed pronoun he in the first conjunct and an implicit pronoun in the second conjunct. State for each one whether it is bound, free, or both bound and
free. Provide paraphrases for each meaning.
John thinks he’s a good cook and Bill does too.
24. Each of the following single statements has at least one implicature in the
situation described. What is it?
a. Statement: You make a better door than a window.
Situation: Someone is blocking your view.
b. Statement: It’s getting late.
Situation: You’re at a party and it’s 4 a.m.
c. Statement: The restaurants are open until midnight.
Situation: It’s 10 o’clock and you haven’t eaten dinner.
d. Statement: If you’d diet, this wouldn’t hurt so badly.
Situation: Someone is standing on your toe.
e. Statement: I thought I saw a fan in the closet.
Situation: It’s sweltering in the room.
f. Statement: Mr. Smith dresses neatly, is well groomed, and is always on
time to class.
Situation: The summary statement in a letter of recommendation to
graduate school.
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CHAPTER 3 The Meaning of Language
g. Statement: Most of the food is gone.
Situation: You arrived late at a cocktail party.
h. Statement: John or Mary made a mistake.
Situation: You’re looking over some work done by John and Mary.
25. In each of the following dialogues between Jack and Laura, there is a conversational implicature. What is it?
a. Jack: Did you make a doctor’s appointment?
Laura: Their line was busy.
b. Jack: Do you have the play tickets?
Laura: Didn’t I give them to you?
c. Jack: Does your grandmother have a live-in boyfriend?
Laura: She’s very traditional.
d. Jack: How did you like the string quartet?
Laura: I thought the violist was swell.
e. Laura: What are Boston’s chances of winning the World Series?
Jack: Do bowling balls float?
f. Laura: Do you own a cat?
Jack: I’m allergic to everything.
g. Laura: Did you mow the grass and wash the car like I told you to?
Jack: I mowed the grass.
h. Laura: Do you want dessert?
Jack: Is the Pope Catholic?
26. A. Think of ten negative polarity items such as give a hoot or have a red
cent.
B. Challenge exercise: Can you think of other contexts without overt
negation that “license” their use? (Hint: One answer is discussed in the
text, but there are others.)
27. Challenge exercise: Suppose that, contrary to what was argued in the text,
the noun phrase no baby does refer to some individual just like the baby
does. It needn’t be an actual baby but some abstract “empty” object that
we’ll call ∅. Show that this approach to the semantics of no baby, when
applying Semantic Rule I and taking the restricting nature of adverbs into
account (everyone who swims beautifully also swims), predicts that No
baby sleeps soundly entails No baby sleeps, and explain why this is wrong.
28. Consider: “The meaning of words lies not in the words themselves, but in
our attitude toward them,” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (the author of The
Little Prince). Do you think this is true, partially true, or false? Defend
your point of view, providing examples if needed.
29. The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States states:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
It has long been argued that the citizens of the United States have an absolute right to own guns, based on this amendment. Apply Grice’s Maxims to
the Second Amendment and agree or disagree.
4
Phonetics: The Sounds
of Language
I gradually came to see that Phonetics had an important bearing on human relations—that
when people of different nations pronounce each other’s languages really well (even if
vocabulary & grammar not perfect), it has an astonishing effect of bringing them together,
it puts people on terms of equality, a good understanding between them immediately
springs up.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF DANIEL JONES
When you know a language you know the sounds of that language, and you
know how to combine those sounds into words. When you know English you
know the sounds represented by the letters b, s, and u, and you are able to combine them to form the words bus or sub.
Although languages may contain different sounds, the sounds of all the languages of the world together constitute a class of sounds that the human vocal
tract is designed to make. This chapter will discuss these speech sounds, how
they are produced, and how they may be classified.
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
Sound Segments
“Herman” is reprinted with permission from Laughing-Stock Licensing, Inc., Ottawa, Canada. All Rights
Reserved.
The study of speech sounds is called phonetics. To describe speech sounds, it
is necessary to know what an individual sound is, and how each sound differs from all others. This is not as easy as it may seem, for when we speak, the
sounds seem to run together and it isn’t at all obvious where one sound ends and
the next begins. However, when we know the language we hear the individual
sounds in our “mind’s ear” and are able to make sense of them, unlike the sign
painter in the cartoon.
A speaker of English knows that there are three sounds in the word bus. Yet,
physically the word is just one continuous sound. You can segment that one
sound into parts because you know English. And you recognize those parts
when they occur elsewhere as b does in bet or rob, as u does in up, and as s does
in sister.
It is not possible to segment the sound of someone clearing her throat into a
sequence of discrete units. This is not because throat-clearing is one continuous
sound. It is because such sounds are not speech and are therefore not able to be
segmented into the sounds of speech.
Speakers of English can separate keepout into the two words keep and out
because they know the language. We do not generally pause between words
(except to take a breath), even though we may think we do. Children learn-
Sound Segments
ing a language reveal this fact. A two-year-old child going down stairs heard
his mother say, “hold on.” He replied, “I’m holing don, I’m holing don,” not
knowing where the break between words occurred. In fact, word boundary misperceptions have changed the form of words historically. At an earlier stage of
English, the word apron was napron. However, the phrase a napron was so
often misperceived as an apron that the word lost its initial n.
Some phrases and sentences that are clearly distinct when printed may be
ambiguous when spoken. Read the following pairs aloud and see why we might
misinterpret what we hear:
grade A
I scream
The sun’s rays meet
gray day
ice cream
The sons raise meat
The lack of breaks between spoken words and individual sounds often makes
us think that speakers of foreign languages run their words together, unaware
that we do too. X-ray motion pictures of someone speaking make the absence of
breaks very clear. One can see the tongue, jaw, and lips in continuous motion as
the individual sounds are produced.
Yet, if you know a language you have no difficulty segmenting the continuous
sounds of speech. It doesn’t matter if there is an alphabet for the language or
whether the listener can read and write. Everyone who knows a language knows
how to segment sentences into words, and words into sounds.
Identity of Speech Sounds
By infinitesimal movements of the tongue countless different vowels can be produced, all
of them in use among speakers of English who utter the same vowels no oftener than they
make the same fingerprints.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, 1950
It is truly amazing, given the continuity of the speech signal, that we are able to
understand the individual words in an utterance. This ability is more surprising
because no two speakers ever say the same word identically. The speech signal
produced when one speaker says cat is not the same as that of another speaker’s
cat. Even two utterances of cat by the same speaker will differ to some degree.
Our knowledge of a language determines when we judge physically different
sounds to be the same. We know which aspects of pronunciation are linguistically important and which are not. For example, if someone coughs in the middle
of saying “How (cough) are you?” a listener will ignore the cough and interpret
this simply as “How are you?” People speak at different pitch levels, at different
rates of speed, and even with their heads encased in a helmet, like Darth Vader.
However, such personal differences are not linguistically significant.
Our linguistic knowledge makes it possible to ignore nonlinguistic differences
in speech. Furthermore, we are capable of making sounds that we know are
not speech sounds in our language. Many English speakers can make a clicking
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
sound of disapproval that writers sometimes represent as tsk. This sound never
occurs as part of an English word. It is even difficult for many English speakers
to combine this clicking sound with other sounds. Yet clicks are speech sounds in
Xhosa, Zulu, Sosotho, and Khoikhoi—languages spoken in southern Africa—
just like the k or t in English. Speakers of those languages have no difficulty
producing them as parts of words. Thus, tsk is a speech sound in Xhosa but not
in English. The sound represented by the letters th in the word think is a speech
sound in English but not in French. In general, languages differ to a greater or
lesser degree in the inventory of speech sounds that words are built from.
The science of phonetics attempts to describe all of the sounds used in all
languages of the world. Acoustic phonetics focuses on the physical properties
of sounds; auditory phonetics is concerned with how listeners perceive these
sounds; and articulatory phonetics—the primary concern of this chapter—is the
study of how the vocal tract produces the sounds of language.
The Phonetic Alphabet
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet
of which only the consonants—and not all of them—have any agreed speech value.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Preface to Pygmalion, 1912
Orthography, or alphabetic spelling, does not represent the sounds of a language
in a consistent way. To be scientific—and phonetics is a science—we must devise
a way for the same sound to be spelled with the same letter every time, and for
any letter to stand for the same sound every time.
To see that ordinary spelling with our Roman alphabet is woefully inadequate
for the task, consider sentences such as:
Did he believe that Caesar could see the people seize the seas?
The silly amoeba stole the key to the machine.
The same sound is represented variously by e, ie, ae, ee, eo, ei, ea, y, oe, ey, and i.
On the other hand, consider:
My father wanted many a village dame badly.
Here the letter a represents the various sounds in father, wanted, many, and so on.
Making the spelling waters yet muddier, we find that a combination of letters
may represent a single sound:
shoot
either
coat
character
deal
glacial
Thomas
rough
theater
physics
nation
plain
Or, conversely, the single letter x, when not pronounced as z, usually stands
for the two sounds ks as in sex (you may have to speak aloud to hear that sex is
pronounced seks).
Sound Segments
Some letters have no sound in certain words (so-called silent letters):
mnemonic
pterodactyl
psychology
bough
autumn
write
sword
lamb
resign
hole
debt
island
ghost
corps
gnaw
knot
Or, conversely, there may be no letter to represent sounds that occur. In many
words, the letter u represents a y sound followed by a u sound:
cute
fume
use
(sounds like kyute; compare: coot)
(sounds like fyume; compare: fool)
(sounds like yuse; compare: Uzbekistan)
Throughout several centuries English scholars have advocated spelling
reform. George Bernard Shaw complained that spelling was so inconsistent that
fish could be spelled ghoti—gh as in tough, o as in women, and ti as in nation.
Nonetheless, spelling reformers failed to change our spelling habits, and it took
phoneticians to invent an alphabet that absolutely guaranteed a one sound–one
symbol correspondence. There could be no other way to study the sounds of all
human languages scientifically.
In 1888 members of the International Phonetic Association developed a phonetic
alphabet to symbolize the sounds of all languages. They utilized both ordinary letters and invented symbols. Each character of the alphabet had exactly one value
across all of the world’s languages. Someone who knew this alphabet would know
how to pronounce a word written in it, and upon hearing a word pronounced,
would know how to write it using the alphabetic symbols. The inventors of this
International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, knew that a phonetic alphabet should
include just enough symbols to represent the fundamental sounds of all languages.
Table 4.1 is a list of the IPA symbols that we will use to represent English
speech sounds. The symbols do not tell us everything about the sounds, which
may vary from person to person and which may depend on their position in a
word. They are not all of the phonetic symbols needed for English, but they will
suffice for our purposes. When we discuss the sounds in more detail later in the
chapter, we will add appropriate symbols. From now on we will enclose phonetic
symbols in square brackets [ ] to distinguish them from ordinary letters.
TABLE 4.1 | A Phonetic Alphabet for English Pronunciation
Consonants
p
b
m
f
v
θ
ð
ʃ
ʒ
pill
bill
mill
feel
veal
thigh
thy
shill
measure
t
d
n
s
z
tʃ
dʒ
ʍ
till
dill
nil
seal
zeal
chill
gin
which
Vowels
k
g
ŋ
h
l
r
j
w
kill
gill
ring
heal
leaf
reef
you
witch
i
e
u
o
æ
ʌ
aɪ
ɔɪ
beet
bait
boot
boat
bat
butt
bite
boy
ɪ
ɛ
ʊ
ɔ
a
ə
aʊ
bit
bet
foot
bore
pot/bar
sofa
bout
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
The symbol [ə] in sofa toward the bottom right of the chart is called a schwa.
We use it to represent vowels in syllables that are not emphasized in speaking
and whose duration is very short, such as general, about, reader, etc. The schwa
is pronounced with the mouth in a neutral position and is a brief, colorless
vowel. The schwa is reserved for the vowel sound in all reduced syllables, even
though its pronunciation may vary slightly according to its position in the word
and who is speaking. All other vowel symbols in the chart occur in syllables that
receive at least some emphasis.
Speakers from different parts of the country may pronounce some words differently. For example, some of you may pronounce the words which and witch
identically. If you do, the initial sound of both words is symbolized by [w] in the
chart. If you don’t, the breathy wh of which is represented by [ʍ].
Some speakers of English pronounce bought and pot with the same vowel;
others pronounce them with the vowel sounds in bore and bar, respectively. We
have therefore listed both words in the chart of symbols. It is difficult to include
all the phonetic symbols needed to represent all differences in English. There
may be sounds in your speech that are not represented, and vice versa, but that’s
okay. There are many varieties of English. The versions spoken in England, in
Australia, in Ireland, and in India, among others, differ in their pronunciations.
And even within American English, phonetic differences exist among the many
dialects, as we discuss in chapter 9.
The symbols in Table 4.1 are IPA symbols with one small exception. The
IPA uses an upside-down “r” (ɹ) for the English sound r. We, and many writers,
prefer the right side up symbol r for clarity when writing for an English-reading
audience. Apart from “r,” some writers use different symbols for other sounds
that once were traditional for transcribing American English. You may encounter these in other books. Here are some equivalents:
IPA
Alternative
ʃ
ʒ
tʃ
dʒ
ʊ
š
ž
č
ǰ
u
Using the IPA symbols, we can now unambiguously represent the pronunciation of words. For example, in the six words below, ou represents six distinct
vowel sounds; the gh is silent in all but rough, where it is pronounced [f]; the th
represents a single sound, either [Ð] or [ð], and the l in would is also silent. However, the phonetic transcription gives us the actual pronunciation.
Spelling
Pronunciation
though
thought
rough
bough
through
would
[ðo]
[θɔt]
[rʌf]
[baʊ]
[θru]
[wʊd]
Articulatory Phonetics
Articulatory Phonetics
The voice is articulated by the lips and the tongue. . . . Man speaks by means of the air
which he inhales into his entire body and particularly into the body cavities. When the air
is expelled through the empty space it produces a sound, because of the resonances in
the skull. The tongue articulates by its strokes; it gathers the air in the throat and pushes it
against the palate and the teeth, thereby giving the sound a definite shape. If the tongue
would not articulate each time, by means of its strokes, man would not speak clearly and
would only be able to produce a few simple sounds.
HIPPOCRATES (460–377 b.c.e.)
The production of any sound involves the movement of air. Most speech sounds
are produced by pushing lung air through the vocal cords—a pair of thin membranes—up the throat, and into the mouth or nose, and finally out of the body.
A brief anatomy lesson is in order. The opening between the vocal cords is the
glottis and is located in the voice box or larynx, pronounced “lair rinks.” The
tubular part of the throat above the larynx is the pharynx (rhymes with larynx). What sensible people call “the mouth,” linguists call the oral cavity to
distinguish it from the nasal cavity, which is the nose and the plumbing that
connects it to the throat, plus your sinuses. Finally there are the tongue and the
lips, both of which are capable of rapid movement and shape changing. All of
these together comprise the vocal tract. Differing vocal tract shapes result in the
differing sounds of language. Figure 4.1 should make these descriptions clearer.
(The vocal cords and larynx are not specifically labeled in the figure.)
Consonants
The sounds of all languages fall into two classes: consonants and vowels. Consonants are produced with some restriction or closure in the vocal tract that
impedes the flow of air from the lungs. In phonetics, the terms consonant and
vowel refer to types of sounds, not to the letters that represent them. In speaking
of the alphabet, we may call “a” a vowel and “c” a consonant, but that means
only that we use the letter “a” to represent vowel sounds and the letter “c” to
represent consonant sounds.
Place of Articulation
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue
taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Lolita, 1955
We classify consonants according to where in the vocal tract the airflow restriction occurs, called the place of articulation. Movement of the tongue and lips
creates the constriction, reshaping the oral cavity in various ways to produce the
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
NASAL CAVITY
alveolar ridge palate
teeth
5
lip
4
1
2
velum
(soft palate)
6
ORAL CAVITY
3
uvula
7
lip
TONGUE
PHARYNX
196
8
glottis
FIGURE 4.1 | The vocal tract. Places of articulation: 1. bilabial; 2. labiodental;
3. interdental; 4. alveolar; 5. (alveo)palatal; 6. velar; 7. uvular; 8. glottal.
various sounds. We are about to discuss the major places of articulation. As you
read the description of each sound class, refer to Table 4.1, which provides key
words containing the sounds. As you pronounce these words, try to feel which
articulators are moving. (Watching yourself in a mirror helps, too.) Look at Figure 4.1 for help with the terminology.
Bilabials [p] [b] [m] When we produce a [p], [b], or [m] we articulate by bringing
both lips together.
Labiodentals [f] [v] We also use our lips to form [f] and [v]. We articulate these
sounds by touching the bottom lip to the upper teeth.
Interdentals [θ] [ð] These sounds, both spelled th, are pronounced by inserting
the tip of the tongue between the teeth. However, for some speakers the tongue
merely touches behind the teeth, making a sound more correctly called dental.
Articulatory Phonetics
Watch yourself in a mirror and say think [θɪŋk] or these [ðiz] and see where your
tongue tip goes.
Alveolars [t] [d] [n] [s] [z] [l] [r] All seven of these sounds are pronounced with
the tongue raised in various ways to the alveolar ridge.
• For [t,d,n] the tongue tip is raised and touches the ridge, or slightly in
front of it.
• For [s,z] the sides of the front of the tongue are raised, but the tip is lowered so that air escapes over it.
• For [l] the tongue tip is raised while the rest of the tongue remains down,
permitting air to escape over its sides. Hence, [l] is called a lateral sound.
You can feel this in the “l’s” of Lolita.
• For [r] [IPA ɹ] most English speakers either curl the tip of the tongue back
behind the alveolar ridge, or bunch up the top of the tongue behind the
ridge. As opposed to [l], air escapes through the central part of the mouth
when [r] is articulated. It is a central liquid.
Palatals [ʃ] [ʒ] [tʃ] [dʒ] [j] For these sounds, which occur in mission [mɪʃən], measure [mɛʒər], cheap [tʃip], judge [dʒʌdʒ], and yoyo [jojo], the constriction occurs
by raising the front part of the tongue to the palate.
Velars [k] [g] [ŋ] Another class of sounds is produced by raising the back of the
tongue to the soft palate or velum. The initial and final sounds of the words kick
[kɪk] and gig [gɪg] and the final sounds of the words back [bӕk], bag [bӕg], and
bang [bӕŋ] are all velar sounds.
Uvulars [ʀ] [q] [ɢ] Uvular sounds are produced by raising the back of the tongue
to the uvula, the fleshy protuberance that hangs down in the back of our throats.
The r in French is often a uvular trill symbolized by [ʀ]. The uvular sounds [q]
and [ɢ] occur in Arabic. These sounds do not ordinarily occur in English.
Glottals [h] [ʔ] The sound of [h] is from the flow of air through the open glottis,
and past the tongue and lips as they prepare to pronounce a vowel sound, which
always follows [h].
If the air is stopped completely at the glottis by tightly closed vocal cords, the
sound upon release of the cords is a glottal stop [ʔ]. The interjection uh-oh, that
you hope never to hear your dentist utter, has two glottal stops and is spelled
phonetically [ʔʌʔo].
Table 4.2 summarizes the classification of these English consonants by their
place of articulation.
Manner of Articulation
We have described several classes of consonants according to their place of articulation, yet we are still unable to distinguish the sounds in each class from one
another. What distinguishes [p] from [b] or [b] from [m]? All are bilabial sounds.
What is the difference between [t], [d], and [n], which are all alveolar sounds?
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TABLE 4.2 | Place of Articulation of English Consonants
Bilabial
Labiodental
Interdental
Alveolar
Palatal
Velar
Glottal
p
f
θ
t
ʃ
k
h
b
v
ð
d
ʒ
g
ʔ
m
n
tʃ
ŋ
s
dʒ
z
l
r
Speech sounds also vary in the way the airstream is affected as it flows from
the lungs up and out of the mouth and nose. It may be blocked or partially
blocked; the vocal cords may vibrate or not vibrate. We refer to this as the manner of articulation.
Voiced and Voiceless Sounds
Sounds are voiceless when the vocal cords are apart so that air flows freely
through the glottis into the oral cavity. [p] and [s] in super [supər] are two of the
several voiceless sounds of English.
If the vocal cords are together, the airstream forces its way through and causes
them to vibrate. Such sounds are voiced. [b] and [z] in buzz [bʌz] are two of the
many voiced sounds of English. To get a sense of voicing, try putting a finger in
each ear and say the voiced “z-z-z-z-z.” You can feel the vibrations of the vocal
cords. If you now say the voiceless “s-s-s-s-s,” you will not sense these vibrations
(although you might hear a hissing sound). When you whisper, you are making
all the speech sounds voiceless. Try it! Whisper “Sue” and “zoo.” No difference,
right?
The voiced/voiceless distinction is very important in English. This phonetic
property distinguishes the words in word pairs like the following:
rope/robe
[rop]/[rob]
fate/fade
[fet]/[fed]
rack/rag
[ræk]/[ræg]
wreath/wreathe
[riθ]/[rið]
The first word of each pair ends with a voiceless sound and the second word
with a voiced sound. All other aspects of the sounds in each word pair are identical; the position of the lips and tongue is the same.
The voiced/voiceless distinction also occurs in the following pairs, where the
first word begins with a voiceless sound and the second with a voiced sound:
fine/vine
[faɪn]/[vaɪn]
peat/beat
[pit]/[bit]
seal/zeal
[sil/zil]
tote/dote
[tot]/[dot]
choke/joke
[tʃok]/[dʒok]
kale/gale
[kel]/[gel]
In our discussion of [p], we did not distinguish the initial sound in the word
pit from the second sound in the word spit. There is, however, a phonetic differ-
Articulatory Phonetics
ence in these two voiceless stops. During the production of voiceless sounds, the
glottis is open and the air flows freely between the vocal cords. When a voiceless
sound is followed by a voiced sound such as a vowel, the vocal cords must close
so they can vibrate.
Voiceless sounds fall into two classes depending on the timing of the vocal
cord closure. When we say pit, the vocal cords remain open for a very short time
after the lips come apart to release the p. We call this p aspirated because a brief
puff of air escapes before the glottis closes.
When we pronounce the p in spit, however, the vocal cords start vibrating as
soon as the lips open. That p is unaspirated. Hold your palm about two inches
in front of your lips and say pit. You will feel a puff of air, which you will not
feel when you say spit. The t in tick and the k in kin are also aspirated voiceless
stops, while the t in stick and the k in skin are unaspirated.
Finally, in the production of the voiced [b] (and [d] and [g]), the vocal cords
are vibrating throughout the closure of the lips, and continue to vibrate during
the vowel sound that follows after the lips part.
We indicate aspirated sounds by writing the phonetic symbol with a raised h,
as in the following examples:
pool
tale
kale
[pʰul]
[tʰel]
[kʰel]
spool
stale
scale
[spul]
[stel]
[skel]
Figure 4.2 shows in diagrammatic form the timing of lip closure in relation to
the state of the vocal cords.
Nasal and Oral Sounds
The voiced/voiceless distinction differentiates the bilabials [b] and [p]. The sound
[m] is also a bilabial, and it is voiced. What distinguishes it from [b]?
Figure 4.1 shows the roof of the mouth divided into the (hard) palate and the
soft palate (or velum). The palate is a hard bony structure at the front of the
mouth. You can feel it with your thumb. First, wash your hands. Now, slide your
thumb along the hard palate back toward the throat; you will feel the velum,
which is where the flesh becomes soft and pliable. The velum terminates in the
uvula, which you can see in a mirror if you open your mouth wide and say
“aaah.” The velum is movable, and when it is raised all the way to touch the
back of the throat, the passage through the nose is cut off and air can escape
only through the mouth.
Sounds produced with the velum up, blocking the air from escaping through
the nose, are oral sounds, because the air can escape only through the oral cavity. Most sounds in all languages are oral sounds. When the velum is not in
its raised position, air escapes through both the nose and the mouth. Sounds
produced this way are nasal sounds. The sound [m] is a nasal consonant. Thus
[m] is distinguished from [b] because it is a nasal sound, whereas [b] is an oral
sound.
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
FIGURE 4.2 | Timing of lip closure and vocal-cord vibrations for voiced, voiceless
unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated bilabial stops [b], [p], [ph].
The diagrams in Figure 4.3 show the position of the lips and the velum when
[m], [b], and [p] are articulated. The sounds [p], [b], and [m] are produced by
stopping the airflow at the lips; [m] and [b] differ from [p] by being voiced;
[m] differs from [b] by being nasal. (If you ever wondered why people sound
FIGURE 4.3 | Position of lips and velum for m (lips together, velum down) and b, p (lips
together, velum up).
Articulatory Phonetics
TABLE 4.3 | Four Classes of Speech Sounds
Voiced
Voiceless
Oral
Nasal
bdg
ptk
mnŋ
*
*Nasal consonants in English are usually voiced. Both voiced and
voiceless nasal sounds occur in other languages.
“nasally” when they have a cold, it’s because excessive mucous production prevents the velum from closing properly during speech.)
The same oral/nasal difference occurs in raid [red] and rain [ren], rug [rʌg]
and rung [rʌ ŋ]. The velum is raised in the production of [d] and [g], preventing the air from flowing through the nose, whereas for [n] and [ŋ] the velum is
down, allowing the air out through both the nose and the mouth when the closure is released. The sounds [m], [n], and [ŋ] are therefore nasal sounds, and [b],
[d], and [g] are oral sounds.
The presence or absence of these phonetic features—nasal and voiced—permit the division of all speech sounds into four classes: voiced, voiceless, nasal,
and oral, as shown in Table 4.3.
We now have three ways of classifying consonants: by voicing, by place of
articulation, and by nasalization. For example, [p] is a voiceless, bilabial, oral
sound; [n] is a voiced, alveolar, nasal sound, and so on.
Stops [p] [b] [m] [t] [d] [n] [k] [g] [ŋ] [tʃ] [dʒ] [ʔ] We are seeing finer and finer distinctions of speech sounds. However, both [t] and [s] are voiceless, alveolar, oral
sounds. What distinguishes them? After all, tack and sack are different words.
Stops are consonants in which the airstream is completely blocked in the oral
cavity for a short period (tens of milliseconds). All other sounds are continuants.
The sound [t] is a stop, but the sound [s] is not, and that is what makes them different speech sounds.
• [p], [b], and [m] are bilabial stops, with the airstream stopped at the
mouth by the complete closure of the lips.
• [t], [d], and [n] are alveolar stops; the airstream is stopped by the tongue,
making a complete closure at the alveolar ridge.
• [k], [g], and [ŋ] are velar stops, with the complete closure at the velum.
• [tʃ] and [dʒ] are palatal affricates with complete stop closures. They will
be further classified later.
• [ʔ] is a glottal stop; the air is completely stopped at the glottis.
We have been discussing the sounds that occur in English. A variety of
stop consonants occur in other languages but not in English. For example, in
Quechua, spoken in Bolivia and Peru, uvular stops occur, where the back of the
tongue is raised and moved rearward to form a complete closure with the uvula.
The phonetic symbol [q] denotes the voiceless version of this stop, which is the
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
initial sound in the name of the language “Quechua.” The voiced uvular stop [ɢ]
also occurs in Quechua.
Fricatives [f] [v] [θ] [ð] [s] [z] [ʃ] [ʒ] [x] [ɣ] [h] In the production of some continuants, the airflow is so severely obstructed that it causes friction, and the sounds
are therefore called fricatives. The first of the following pairs of fricatives are
voiceless; the second voiced.
• [f] and [v] are labiodental fricatives; the friction is created at the lips and
teeth, where a narrow passage permits the air to escape.
• [θ] and [ð] are interdental fricatives, represented by th in thin and then.
The friction occurs at the opening between the tongue and teeth.
• [s] and [z] are alveolar fricatives, with the friction created at the alveolar
ridge.
• [ ʃ] and [ʒ] are palatal fricatives, and contrast in such pairs as mission
[mɪʃən] and measure [mԑʒər]. They are produced with friction created as
the air passes between the tongue and the part of the palate behind the
alveolar ridge. In English, the voiced palatal fricative never begins words
except for foreign words such as genre. The voiceless palatal fricative
begins the words shoe [ʃu] and sure [ʃur] and ends the words rush [rʌʃ]
and push [pʊʃ].
• [x] and [ɣ] denote velar fricatives. They are produced by raising the back
of the tongue toward, but not quite touching, the velum. The friction is
created as air passes through that narrow passage, and the sound is not
unlike clearing your throat. These sounds do not commonly occur in
English, though in some forms of Scottish English the final sound of loch
meaning “lake” is [x]. In rapid speech the g in wagon may be pronounced
[ɣ]. The final sound of the composer J. S. Bach’s name is also pronounced
[x], which is a common sound in German.
• [h] is a glottal fricative. Its relatively weak sound comes from air passing
through the open glottis and pharynx.
All fricatives are continuants. Although the airstream is obstructed as it
passes through the oral cavity, it is not completely stopped.
Affricates [tʃ] [dʒ] These sounds are produced by a stop closure followed immediately by a gradual release of the closure that produces an effect characteristic
of a fricative. The palatal sounds that begin and end the words church and judge
are voiceless and voiced affricates, respectively. Affricates are not continuants
because of the initial stop closure.
Liquids [l] [r] In the production of the sounds [l] and [r], there is some obstruction of the airstream in the mouth, but not enough to cause any real constriction or friction. These sounds are liquids. They are articulated differently, as
described in the earlier alveolar section, but are grouped as a class because they
are acoustically similar. Due to that similarity, foreign speakers of English may
confuse the two sounds and substitute one for the other. It also accounts for
Dennis’s confusion in the cartoon.
Articulatory Phonetics
“Dennis the Menace” © Hank Ketcham. Reprinted with permission of North America Syndicate.
Glides [j] [w] The sounds [j] and [w], the initial sounds of you [ju] and we [wi],
are produced with little obstruction of the airstream. They are always followed
directly by a vowel and do not occur at the end of words (don’t be fooled by
spelling; words ending in y or w like say and saw end in a vowel sound). After
articulating [j] or [w], the tongue glides quickly into place for pronouncing the
next vowel, hence the term glide.
The glide [j] is a palatal sound; the blade of the tongue (the front part minus
the tip) is raised toward the hard palate in a position almost identical to that in
producing the vowel sound [i] in the word beat [bit]. The glide [w] is produced by
both rounding the lips and simultaneously raising the back of the tongue toward
the velum. It is thus a labio-velar glide. Where speakers of English have different
pronunciations for the words which and witch, the labio-velar glide in the first
word is voiceless, symbolized as [ʍ] (an upside-down w). The position of the
tongue and the lips for [w] is similar to that for producing the vowel sound [u]
in suit [sut].
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
Approximants In some books the sounds [w], [j], [r], and [l] are alternatively
called approximants because the articulators approximate a frictional closeness,
but no actual friction occurs. The first three are central approximants, whereas
[l] is a lateral approximant.
Although in this chapter we focus on the sounds of English, the IPA has symbols and classifications for all the sounds of the world’s languages. For example,
many languages have sounds that are referred to as trills, and others have clicks.
These are described in the following sections.
Trills and flaps The “r”-sound of many languages may be different from the
English [r]. A trilled “r” is produced by rapid vibrations of an articulator. An
alveolar trill, as in the Spanish word for dog, perro, is produced by vibrating
the tongue tip against the alveolar ridge. Its IPA symbol is [r], strictly speaking,
though we have co-opted [r] for the English “r.” Many French speakers articulate the initial sound of rouge as a uvular trill, produced by vibrating the uvula.
Its IPA symbol is [ʀ].
Another “r”-sound is called a flap and is produced by a flick of the tongue
against the alveolar ridge. It sounds like a very fast d. It occurs in Spanish in
words like pero meaning “but.” It may also occur in British English in words
such as very. Its IPA symbol is [ɾ]. Most American speakers produce a flap
instead of a [t] or [d] in words like writer and rider, which then sound identical
and are spelled phonetically as [raɪɾər].
Clicks These “exotic” sounds are made by moving air in the mouth between
various articulators. The sound of disapproval often spelled tsk is an alveolar
click that occurs in several languages of southern Africa such as Zulu. A lateral
click, which is like the sound one makes to encourage a horse, occurs in Xhosa.
In fact, the ‘X’ in Xhosa stands for that particular speech sound.
Phonetic Symbols for American English Consonants
We are now capable of distinguishing all of the consonant sounds of English via
the properties of voicing, nasality, and place and manner of articulation. For
example, [f] is a voiceless, (oral), labiodental fricative; [n] is a (voiced), nasal,
alveolar stop. The parenthesized features are usually not mentioned because
they are redundant; all sounds are oral unless nasal is specifically mentioned,
and all nasals are voiced in English.
Table 4.4 lists the consonants by their phonetic features. The rows stand for
manner of articulation and the columns for place of articulation. The entries
are sufficient to distinguish all words in English from one another. For example,
using [p] for both aspirated and unaspirated voiceless bilabial stops, and [b] for
the voiced bilabial stop, suffices to differentiate the words pit, spit, and bit. If a
narrower phonetic transcription of these words is desired, the symbol [pʰ] can be
used to indicate aspiration giving us [pʰɪt], [spɪt], [bɪt]. By “narrow transcription”
we mean one that indicates all the phonetic details of a sound, even those that
do not affect the word.
Examples of words in which these sounds occur are given in Table 4.5.
Articulatory Phonetics
205
TABLE 4.4 | Some Phonetic Symbols for American English Consonants
Bilabial
Labiodental
Interdental
Alveolar
Palatal
Velar
Glottal
ʔ
Stop (oral)
voiceless
voiced
p
b
t
d
k
g
Nasal (voiced)
m
n
ŋ
Fricative
voiceless
voiced
f
v
θ
ð
s
z
ʃ
ʒ
Affricate
voiceless
voiced
h
tʃ
dʒ
Glide
voiceless
voiced
ʍ
w
ʍ
w
j
Liquid (voiced)
(central)
(lateral)
r
l
TABLE 4.5 | Examples of Consonants in English Words
Bilabial
Labiodental
Interdental
Alveolar
Palatal
Velar
Glottal
(ʔ)uh-(ʔ)oh
Stop (oral)
voiceless
voiced
pie
buy
tie
die
kite
guy
Nasal (voiced)
my
night
sing
Fricative
voiceless
voiced
fine
vine
thigh
thy
sue
zoo
Affricate
voiceless
voiced
Glide
voiceless
voiced
Liquid (voiced)
(central)
(lateral)
shoe
measure
high
cheese
jump
which
wipe
you
rye
lye
which
wipe
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
Vowels
Higgins:
Pickering:
Higgins:
Tired of listening to sounds?
Yes. It’s a fearful strain. I rather fancied myself because I can pronounce
twenty-four distinct vowel sounds, but your hundred and thirty beat me. I
can’t hear a bit of difference between most of them.
Oh, that comes with practice. You hear no difference at first, but you keep
on listening and presently you find they’re all as different as A from B.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Pygmalion, 1912
Vowels are produced with little restriction of the airflow from the lungs out
the mouth and/or the nose. The quality of a vowel depends on the shape of the
vocal tract as the air passes through. Different parts of the tongue may be high
or low in the mouth; the lips may be spread or pursed; the velum may be raised
or lowered.
Vowel sounds carry pitch and loudness; you can sing vowels or shout vowels.
They may be longer or shorter in duration. Vowels can stand alone—they can
be produced without consonants before or after them. You can say the vowels of
beat [bit], bit [bɪt], or boot [but], for example, without the initial [b] or the final
[t], but you cannot say a [b] or a [t] alone without at least a little bit of vowel
sound.
Linguists can describe vowels acoustically or electronically. We will discuss
that topic in chapter 8. In this chapter we describe vowels by their articulatory
features as we did with consonants. Just as we say a [d] is pronounced by raising the tongue tip to the alveolar ridge, we say an [i] is pronounced by raising
the body of the tongue toward the palate. With a [b], the lips come together; for
an [ӕ] (the vowel in cat) the tongue is low in the mouth with the tongue tip forward, behind the front teeth.
If you watch a side view of an X-ray (that’s -ray, not -rated!) video of someone’s tongue moving during speech, you will see various parts of the tongue rise
up high and fall down low; at the same time you will see it move forward and
backward in the mouth. These are the dimensions over which vowels are produced. We classify vowels according to three questions:
1.
2.
3.
How high or low in the mouth is the tongue?
How forward or backward in the mouth is the tongue?
Are the lips rounded (pursed) or spread?
Tongue Position
The upper two diagrams in Figure 4.4 show that the tongue is high in the mouth
in the production of the vowels [i] and [u] in the words he [hi] and who [hu]. In
he the front part (but not the tip) of the tongue is raised; in who it is the back of
the tongue. (Prolong the vowels of these words and try to feel the raised part of
your tongue.) These are both high vowels, and the [i] is a high front vowel while
the [u] is a high back vowel.
To produce the vowel sound [a] of hah [ha], the back of the tongue is low
in the mouth, as the lower diagram in Figure 4.4 shows. (The reason a doctor
Articulatory Phonetics
FIGURE 4.4 | Position of the tongue in producing the vowels in he, who, and hah.
examining your throat may ask you to say “ah” is that the tongue is low and
easy to see over.) This vowel is therefore a low back vowel.
The vowels [ɪ] and [ʊ] in the words hit [hɪt] and put [pʰʊt] are similar to those
in heat [hit] and hoot [hut] with slightly lowered tongue positions.
The vowel [æ] in hack [hæk] is produced with the front part of the tongue
low in the mouth, similar to the low vowel [a], but with the front rather than the
back part of the tongue lowered. Say “hack, hah, hack, hah, hack, hah . . .” and
you should feel your tongue moving forward and back in the low part of your
mouth. Thus [æ] is a low front vowel.
The vowels [e] and [o] in bait [bet] and boat [bot] are mid vowels, produced
by raising the tongue to a position midway between the high and low vowels just
discussed. [ɛ] and [ɔ] in the words bet [bɛt] and bore [bɔr] are also mid vowels,
produced with a slightly lower tongue position than [e] and [o], respectively.
Here, [e] and [ɛ] are front; [o] and [ɔ] are back.
To produce the vowel [ʌ] in the word butt [bʌt], the tongue is not strictly high
nor low, front nor back. It is a lower midcentral vowel. The schwa vowel [ə],
which occurs as the first sound in about [əbaʊt], or the final sound of sofa [sofə],
is also articulated with the tongue in a more or less neutral position between
the extremes of high/low, front/back. The schwa is used mostly to represent
unstressed vowels. (We will discuss stress later.)
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
Lip Rounding
Vowels also differ as to whether the lips are rounded or spread. The back vowels
[u], [ʊ], [o], and [ɔ] in boot, put, boat, and bore are the only rounded vowels in
English. They are produced with pursed or rounded lips. You can get a feel for the
rounding by prolonging the word who, as if you were an owl: whoooooooooo.
Now pose for the camera and say cheese, only say it with a prolonged vowel:
cheeeeeeeeeeese. The high front [i] in cheese is unrounded, with the lips in the
shape of a smile, and you can feel it or see it in a mirror. The low vowel [a] in the
words bar, bah, and aha is the only (American) English back vowel that occurs
without lip rounding.
Other languages may differ in whether or not they have rounded vowels.
French and Swedish, for example, have front rounded vowels, which English
lacks. English also lacks a high back unrounded vowel, but this sound occurs
in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and the Cameroonian language FeʔFeʔ, among
others. The IPA symbol for this vowel is [ш], and to show that roundedness is
important, we note that in Mandarin Chinese the unrounded [sш] means “four,”
but the round [su] (like sue) means “speed.”
Figure 4.5 shows the vowels based on tongue “geography.” The position of
the vowel relative to the horizontal axis is a measure of the vowel’s front/back
dimension. Its position relative to the vertical axis is a measure of tongue height.
For example, we see that [i] is a high front vowel, [o] is a midback (rounded)
vowel, and [ʌ] is a lower midcentral vowel, tending toward backness.
Diphthongs
A diphthong is a sequence of two vowel sounds. Diphthongs are present in the
phonetic inventory of many languages, including English. The vowels we have
studied so far are simple vowels, called monophthongs. The vowel sound in the
word bite [baɪt], however, is the [a] vowel sound of father followed rapidly by the
Part of the Tongue Involved
Tongue
Height
FRONT
HIGH
i beet
CENTRAL
I bit
BACK
boot
u
put
Á
ROUNDED
MID
e bait
” bet
E
o
bore
O
Rosa
Ø butt
LOW
boat
œ bat
FIGURE 4.5 | Classification of American English vowels.
bomb a
Articulatory Phonetics
[ɪ] sound of fit, resulting in the diphthong [aɪ]. Similarly, the vowel in bout [baʊt]
is [a] followed by the [ʊ] sound of put, resulting in [aʊ]. Another diphthong that
occurs in English is the vowel sound in boy [bɔɪ], which is the vowel [ɔ] of bore
followed by [ɪ], resulting in [ɔɪ]. The pronunciation of any of these diphthongs
may vary from our description because of the diversity of English speakers.
To some extent the midvowels [e] and [o] may be diphthongized, especially in
American English, though not in other varieties such as Irish English. Many linguists therefore denote these sounds as [eɪ] and [oʊ] as a narrower transcription.
In this book we will stay with [e] and [o] for these vowel sounds.
Nasalization of Vowels
Vowels, like consonants, can be produced with a raised velum that prevents the
air from escaping through the nose, or with a lowered velum that permits air to
pass through the nasal passage. When the nasal passage is blocked, oral vowels
result; when the nasal passage is open, nasal (or nasalized) vowels result. In
English, nasal vowels occur for the most part before nasal consonants in the
same syllable, and oral vowels occur in all other places.
The words bean, bone, bingo, boom, bam, and bang are examples of words
that contain nasalized vowels. To show the nasalization of a vowel in a narrow
phonetic transcription, an extra mark called a diacritic—the symbol ~ (tilde) in
this case—is placed over the vowel, as in bean [bĩn] and bone [bõn].
In languages like French, Polish, and Portuguese, nasalized vowels occur
without nasal consonants. The French word meaning “sound” is son [sõ]. The n
in the spelling is not pronounced but indicates that the vowel is nasal.
Tense and Lax Vowels
Figure 4.5 shows that the vowel [i] has a slightly higher tongue position than
[ɪ]. This is also true for [e] and [ɛ], [u] and [ʊ], and [o] and [ɔ]. The first vowel in
each pair is generally produced with greater tension of the tongue muscles than
its counterpart, and they are often a little longer in duration. These vowels can
be distinguished by the features tense and lax, as shown in the first four rows of
the following:
Tense
Lax
i
e
u
o
a
aɪ
aʊ
ɪ
ɛ
ʊ
ɔ
ɔɪ
æ
ʌ
ə
beat
bait
boot
boat
hah
high
how
bit
bet
put
bore
boy
hat
hut
about
Additionally, [a] is a tense vowel as are the diphthongs [aɪ] and [aʊ], but the
diphthong [ɔɪ] is lax as are [ӕ], [ʌ], and of course [ə]. Tense vowels may occur at
the ends of words: [si], [se], [su], [so], [pa], [saɪ], and [haʊ] represent the English
words see, say, sue, sew, pa, sigh, and how. Lax vowels mostly do not occur
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
at the ends of words; [sɪ], [sɛ], [sʊ], [sæ], [sʌ], and [sə] are not possible words in
English. (The one exception to this generalization is lax [ɔ] and its diphthong
[ɔɪ], which occur in words such as [sɔ] (saw) and [sɔɪ] (soy).)
Different (Tongue) Strokes for Different Folks
The vowels in Figure 4.5 do not represent all the vowels of all English speakers.
They may not represent your particular vowel set. If you speak British English,
there’s a good chance that you have a low, back, rounded vowel in the word
hot that the vowel chart lacks. Canadian English speakers pronounce the vowel
in words like bite as [ʌɪ] rather than [aɪ]. Consonants, too, vary from region to
region, if not from person to person. One person’s “alveolar” stops may technically be dental stops, with the tongue hard behind the upper front teeth. In Britain, the substitution of the glottal stop where an American might use a [t] or [d]
is common. It’s very much the case throughout the English-speaking world that,
as the old song goes, “I say ‘tomayto’ [təmeto], you say ‘tomahto’ [təmato],” and
we lovers of language say “vive la différence.”
Major Phonetic Classes
Biologists divide life forms into larger and smaller classes. They may distinguish
between animals and plants; or within animals, between vertebrates and invertebrates; and within vertebrates, between mammals and reptiles, and so on.
Linguists describe speech sounds similarly. All sounds are consonant sounds
or vowel sounds. Within consonants, all are voiced or unvoiced, and so on. All
the classes of sounds described so far in this chapter combine to form larger,
more general classes that are important in the patterning of sounds in the world’s
languages.
Noncontinuants and Continuants
Stops and affricates belong to the class of noncontinuants. There is a total
obstruction of the airstream in the oral cavity. Nasal stops are included although
air does flow continuously out the nose. All other consonants, and all vowels, are
continuants, in which the stream of air flows continuously out of the mouth.
Obstruents and Sonorants
The non-nasal stops, the fricatives, and the affricates form a major class of
sounds called obstruents. The airstream may be fully obstructed, as in nonnasal stops and affricates, or nearly fully obstructed, as in the production of
fricatives.
Sounds that are not obstruents are sonorants. Vowels, nasal stops [m,n,ŋ],
liquids [l,r], and glides [j,w] are all sonorants. They are produced with much
less obstruction to the flow of air than the obstruents, which permits the air to
resonate. Nasal stops are sonorants because, although the air is blocked in the
mouth, it continues to resonate in the nasal cavity.
Articulatory Phonetics
Consonantal
Obstruents, nasal stops, liquids, and glides are all consonants. There is some
degree of restriction to the airflow in articulating these sounds. With glides
([j,w]), however, the restriction is minimal, and they are the most vowel-like,
and the least consonant-like, of the consonants. Glides are even referred to as
“semivowels” or “semi-consonants” in some books. In recognition of this fact
linguists place the obstruents, nasal stops, and liquids in a subclass of consonants called consonantal, from which the glides are excluded.
Here are some other terms used to form subclasses of consonantal sounds.
These are not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive (e.g., the interdentals
belong to two subclasses). A full course in phonetics would note further classes
that we omit.
Labials [p] [b] [m] [f] [v] [w] [ʍ] Labial sounds are those articulated with the
involvement of the lips. They include the class of bilabial sounds [p] [b] and [m],
the labiodentals [f] and [v], and the labiovelars [w] and [ʍ].
Coronals [θ] [ð] [t] [d] [n] [s] [z] [ʃ] [ʒ] [tʃ] [dʒ] [l] [r] Coronal sounds are articulated by raising the tongue blade. Coronals include the interdentals [θ] [ð], the
alveolars [t] [d] [n] [s] [z], the palatals [ʃ] [ʒ], the affricates [tʃ] [dʒ], and the liquids [l] [r].
Anteriors [p] [b] [m] [f] [v] [θ] [ð] [t] [d] [n] [s] [z] Anterior sounds are consonants
produced in the front part of the mouth, that is, from the alveolar area forward.
They include the labials, the interdentals, and the alveolars.
Sibilants [s] [z] [ʃ] [ʒ] [tʃ] [dʒ] Another class of consonantal sounds is characterized by an acoustic rather than an articulatory property of its members. The
friction created by sibilants produces a hissing sound, which is a mixture of
high-frequency sounds.
Syllabic Sounds
Sounds that may function as the core of a syllable possess the feature syllabic.
Clearly vowels are syllabic, but they are not the only sound class that anchors
syllables.
Liquids and nasals can also be syllabic, as shown by the words dazzle [dӕzl ̩],
faker [fekr̩], rhythm [rɪðm̩], and button [bʌtn̩]. (The diacritic mark under the [l]̩ ,
[r̩], [m̩], and [n̩] is the notation for syllabic.) Placing a schwa [ə] before the syllabic
liquid or nasal also shows that these are separate syllables. The four words could
be written as [dӕzəl], [fekər], [rɪðəm], and [bʌtən]. We will use this transcription.
Similarly, the vowel sound in words like bird and verb are sometimes written as
a syllabic r, [br̩d] and [vr̩b]. For consistency we shall transcribe these words using
the schwa—[bərd] and [vərb]—the only instances where a schwa represents a
stressed vowel.
Obstruents and glides are never syllabic sounds because they are always
accompanied by a vowel, and that vowel functions as the syllabic core.
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
Prosodic Features
Length, pitch, and stress (or “accent”) are prosodic, or suprasegmental, features.
They are features over and above the segmental values such as place or manner
of articulation, thus the “supra” in suprasegmental. The term prosodic comes
from poetry, where it refers to the metrical structure of verse. One of the essential characteristics of poetry is the placement of stress on particular syllables,
which defines the versification of the poem.
Speech sounds that are identical in their place or manner features may differ
in length (duration). Tense vowels are slightly longer than lax vowels, but only
by a few milliseconds. However, in some languages when a vowel is prolonged
to around twice its normal length, it can make a difference between words. In
Japanese the word biru [biru] with a regular i means “building,” but with the
i doubled in length as in biiru, spelled phonetically as [biːru], the meaning is
“beer.” (The colon-like ː is the IPA symbol for segment length or doubling.) In
Japanese vowel length can make the difference between two words.
Japanese, and many other languages such as Finnish and Italian, have long
consonants that may contrast words. When a consonant is long, or doubled,
either the closure or obstruction is prolonged. Pronounced with a short k, the
word saki [saki] means “ahead” in Japanese; pronounced with a long k—prolonging the velar closure—the word sakki [sakːi] means “before.” In effect, the
extended silence of the prolonged closure is meaningful in these languages.
English is not a language in which vowel or consonant length can change a
word. You might say “puleeeeeze” to emphasize your request, but the word is
still please. You may also say in English “Whatttttt a dump!” to express your
dismay at a hotel room, prolonging the t-closure, but the word what is not
changed.
When we speak, we also change the pitch of our voice. The pitch depends on
how fast the vocal cords vibrate; the faster they vibrate, the higher the pitch. If
the larynx is small, as in women and children, the shorter vocal cords vibrate
faster and the pitch is higher, all other things being equal. That is why women
and children have higher-pitched voices than men, in general. When we discuss
tone languages in the next section, we will see that pitch may affect the meaning
of a word.
In many languages, certain syllables in a word are louder, slightly higher in
pitch, and somewhat longer in duration than other syllables in the word. They
are stressed syllables. For example, the first syllable of digest, the noun meaning
“summation of articles,” is stressed, whereas in digest, the verb meaning “to
absorb food,” the second syllable receives greater stress. Stress can be marked in
several ways: for example, by putting an accent mark over the stressed vowel in
the syllable, as in dígest versus digést.
English is a “stress-timed” language. In general, at least one syllable is
stressed in an English word. French is not a stress-timed language. The syllables
have approximately the same loudness, length, and pitch. It is a “syllable-timed”
language. When native English speakers attempt to speak French, they often
stress syllables, so that native French speakers hear French with “an English
Prosodic Features
accent.” When French speakers speak English, they fail to put stress where a
native English speaker would, and that contributes to what English speakers call
a “French accent.”
Tone and Intonation
We have already seen how length and stress can make sounds with the same
segmental properties different. In some languages, these differences make different words, such as the two digests. Pitch, too, can make a difference in certain
languages.
Speakers of all languages vary the pitch of their voices when they talk. The
effect of pitch on a syllable differs from language to language. In English, it
doesn’t matter whether you say cat with a high pitch or a low pitch. It will still
mean “cat.” But if you say [ba] with a high pitch in Nupe (a language spoken in
Nigeria), it will mean “to be sour,” whereas if you say [ba] with a low pitch, it
will mean “to count.” Languages that use the pitch of individual vowels or syllables to contrast meanings of words are called tone languages.
More than half the world’s languages are tone languages. There are more
than one thousand tone languages spoken in Africa alone. Many languages of
Asia, such as Mandarin Chinese, Burmese, and Thai, are tone languages. In
Thai, for example, the same string of segmental sounds represented by [naː] will
mean different things if one says the sounds with a low pitch, a midpitch, a high
pitch, a falling pitch from high to low, or a rising pitch from low to high. Thai
therefore has five linguistic tones, as illustrated as follows:
(Diacritics are used to represent distinctive tones in the phonetic
transcriptions.)
[`]
[-]
[´]
[ˆ]
[ˇ]
L
M
H
HL
LH
low tone
mid tone
high tone
falling tone
rising tone
[nàː]
[nāː]
[náː]
[nâː]
[nǎː]
“a nickname”
“rice paddy”
“young maternal uncle or aunt”
“face”
“thick”
There are two kinds of tones. If the pitch is level across the syllable, we have
a register tone. If the pitch changes across the syllable, whether from high to
low or vice versa, we have a contour tone. Thai has three level and two contour
tones. Commonly, tone languages will have two or three register tones and possibly one or two contour tones.
In a tone language it is not the absolute pitch of the syllables that is important
but the relations among the pitches of different syllables. Thus men, women,
and children with differently pitched voices can still communicate in a tone
language.
Tones generally have a lexical function, that is, they make a difference
between words. But in some languages tones may also have a grammatical function, as in Edo spoken in midwestern Nigeria. The tone on monosyllabic verbs
followed by a direct object indicates the tense and transitivity of the verb. Low
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
tone means present tense, transitive; high tone means past tense, transitive, as
illustrated here:
òtà gbẽ̀
Ota write+PRES+TRANS
Ota writes a book.
òtà gbẽ́
Ota write+PAST+TRANS
Ota wrote a book.
èbé
book
èbé
book
In many tone languages we find a continual lowering of the absolute pitch on
the tones throughout an utterance. The relative pitches remain the same, however. In the following sentence in Twi, spoken in Ghana, the relative pitch rather
than the absolute pitch is important.
“Kofi searches for a little food for his friend’s child.”
hwe~hw”!
Ko~fí
LH
L H
a!dua~N
H L
ka~kra! ma~
L H
L
n~' a!da~mfo~
ba!
L HL L
H
The actual pitches of these syllables would be rather different from each other,
as shown in the following musical staff-like figure (the higher the number, the
higher the pitch):
7
fê
hw”! a!
6
kra!
5 Ko~
4
3
2
1
hwe~
a!
dua~N
ka~
ba!
ma~ n~'
da~mfo~
The lowering of the pitch is called downdrift. In languages with downdrift, a
high tone that occurs after a low tone, or a low tone after a high tone, is lower in
pitch than the preceding similarly marked tone. Notice that the first high tone in
the sentence is given the pitch value 7. The next high tone (which occurs after an
intervening low tone) is 6; that is, it is lower in pitch than the first high tone.
This example shows that in analyzing tones, just as in analyzing segments,
all the physical properties need not be considered. Only essential features are
important in language—in this case, whether the tone is high or low in relation
to the other pitches. The absolute pitch is inessential. Speakers of tone languages
are able to ignore the linguistically irrelevant absolute pitch differences between
individual speakers and attend to the linguistically relevant relative pitch differences, much like speakers of non-tone languages ignore pitch altogether.
Languages that are not tone languages, such as English, are called intonation languages. The pitch contour of the utterance varies, but in an intonation
language as opposed to a tone language, pitch is not used to distinguish words
Phonetic Symbols and Spelling Correspondences
from each other. Intonation may affect the meaning of whole sentences, so that
John is here spoken with falling pitch at the end is interpreted as a statement, but
with rising pitch at the end, a question. We’ll have more to say about intonation
in the next chapter.
Phonetic Symbols and
Spelling Correspondences
“Family Circus” © Bil Keane, Inc. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
Table 4.6 shows the sound/spelling correspondences for American English consonants and vowels. (We have not given all possible spellings for every sound;
however, these examples should help you relate English orthography to the
English sound system.) We have included the symbols for the voiceless aspirated
stops to illustrate that what speakers usually consider one sound—for example
p—may occur phonetically as two sounds, [p], [pʰ].
Some of these pronunciations may differ from your own. For example, you
may (or may not) pronounce the words cot and caught identically. In the form of
English described here, cot and caught are pronounced differently, so cot is one
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
of the examples of the vowel sound [a] as in car. Caught illustrates the vowel [ɔ]
as in core.
There will be other differences, too, because English is a worldwide language
and is spoken in many forms in many countries. The English examples used
in this book are a compromise among several varieties of American English,
but this should not deter you. Our purpose is to teach phonetics in general,
and to show you how phonetics might describe the speech sounds of any of
the world’s languages with the proper symbols and diacritics. We merely use
American English for illustration, and we provide the major phonetic symbols
for American English to show you how such symbols may be used to describe
the phonetics of any of the world’s languages.
TABLE 4.6 | Phonetic Symbol/English Spelling Correspondences
Consonants
Symbol
Examples
p
pʰ
b
m
t
tʰ
d
n
k
kʰ
g
ŋ
f
v
s
z
θ
ð
ʃ
ʒ
tʃ
tʃʰ
dʒ
l
r
j
w
ʍ
h
ʔ
ɾ
spit tip Lapp
pit prick plaque appear
bit tab brat bubble
mitt tam smack Emmy camp comb
stick pit kissed write
tick intend pterodactyl attack
Dick cad drip loved ride
nick kin snow mnemonic Gnostic pneumatic know
skin stick scat critique elk
curl kin charisma critic mechanic close
girl burg longer Pittsburgh
sing think finger
fat philosophy flat phlogiston coffee reef cough
vat dove gravel
sip skip psychology pass pats democracy scissors fasten deceive descent
zip jazz razor pads kisses Xerox design lazy scissors maize
thigh through wrath ether Matthew
thy their weather lathe either
shoe mush mission nation fish glacial sure
measure vision azure casual decision rouge
match rich righteous
choke Tchaikovsky discharge
judge midget George magistrate residual
leaf feel call single
reef fear Paris singer
you yes feud use
witch swim queen
which where whale (for speakers who pronounce which differently than witch)
hat who whole rehash
bottle button glottal (for some speakers), (ʔ)uh-(ʔ)oh
writer, rider, latter, ladder
The “Phonetics” of Signed Languages
TABLE 4.6 | (Continued)
Vowels
i
ɪ
e
ɛ
æ
u
ʊ
ʌ
o
ɔ
a
ə
aɪ
aʊ
ɔɪ
beet beat be receive key believe amoeba people Caesar Vaseline serene
bit consist injury bin women
gate bait ray great eight gauge greyhound
bet serenity says guest dead said
pan act laugh comrade
boot lute who sewer through to too two move Lou true suit
put foot butcher could
cut tough among oven does cover flood
coat go beau grow though toe own sew
caught stalk core saw ball awe auto
cot father palm sergeant honor hospital melodic
sofa alone symphony suppose melody bird verb the
bite sight by buy die dye aisle choir liar island height sign
about brown doubt coward sauerkraut
boy oil
The “Phonetics”
of Signed Languages
Earlier we noted that signed languages, like all other human languages, are
governed by a grammatical system that includes syntactic and morphological
rules. Signed languages are like spoken languages in another respect; signs can
be broken down into smaller units analogous to the phonetic features discussed
in this chapter. Just as spoken languages distinguish sounds according to place
and manner of articulation, so signed languages distinguish signs according to
the place and manner in which the signs are articulated by the hands. The signs
of ASL, for example, are formed by three major features:
1.
2.
3.
The configuration of the hand (handshape)
The movement of the hand and arms toward or away from the body
The location of the hands in signing space
To illustrate how these features define a sign, the ASL sign meaning “arm” is
a flat hand, moving to touch the upper arm. It has three features: flat hand,
motion upward, upper arm.
ASL has over 30 handshapes. But not all signed languages share the same
handshapes, just as not all spoken languages share the same places of articulation (French lacks interdental stops; English lacks the uvular trill of French).
For example, the T handshape of ASL does not occur in the European signed
languages. Similarly, Chinese Sign Language has a handshape formed with an
open hand with all fingers extended except the ring finger. ASL does not have
this handshape.
217
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
FIGURE 4.6 | Minimal contrasts illustrating major formational parameters.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher from THE SIGNS OF LANGUAGE by Edward Klima and Ursula
Bellugi, p. 42, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1979 by the President and
Fellows of Harvard College.
Movement can be either straight or in an arc. Secondary movements include
wiggling or hooking fingers. Signs can also be unidirectional (moving in one
direction) or bidirectional (moving in one direction and then back again). The
location of signs is defined relative to the body or face and by whether the sign
involves vertical movement, horizontal movement, or movement to or away from
the body.
As in spoken language, a change along one of these parameters can result
in different words. Just as a difference in voicing or tone can result in different
words in a spoken language, a change in location, handshape, or movement can
Summary
result in different signs with different meanings. For example, the sign meaning “father” differs from the sign meaning “fine” only in the place of articulation. Both signs are formed with a spread five-finger handshape, but the thumb
touches the signer’s forehead in “father” and it touches his chest in “fine.”
Figure 4.6 illustrates several sets of words that differ from each other along
one or another of the phonetic parameters of ASL.
There are two-handed and one-handed signs. One-handed signs are formed
with the speaker’s dominant hand, whether left or right. Just as spoken languages have features that do not distinguish different words (e.g., consonant
length in English), in ASL (and probably all signed languages), a difference in
handedness does not affect the meaning of the sign.
The parallels that exist in the organization of sounds and signs are not surprising when we consider that similar cognitive systems underlie both spoken
and signed languages.
Summary
The science of speech sounds is called phonetics. It aims to provide the set of
properties necessary to describe and distinguish all the sounds in human languages throughout the world.
When we speak, the physical sounds we produce are continuous stretches of
sound, which are the physical representations of strings of discrete linguistic segments. Knowledge of a language permits one to separate continuous speech into
individual sounds and words.
The discrepancy between spelling and sounds in English and other languages
motivated the development of phonetic alphabets in which one letter corresponds
to one sound. The major phonetic alphabet in use is the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA), which includes modified Roman letters and diacritics, by means
of which the sounds of all human languages can be represented. To distinguish
between orthography (spelling) and phonetic transcriptions, we write the latter
between square brackets, as in [fə̃nɛɾɪk] for phonetic.
All English speech sounds come from the movement of lung air through the
vocal tract. The air moves through the glottis (i.e., between the vocal cords), up
the pharynx, through the oral (and possibly the nasal) cavity, and out the mouth
or nose.
Human speech sounds fall into classes according to their phonetic properties.
All speech sounds are either consonants or vowels, and all consonants are either
obstruents or sonorants. Consonants have some obstruction of the airstream in
the vocal tract, and the location of the obstruction defines their place of articulation, some of which are bilabial, labiodental, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular,
and glottal.
Consonants are further classified according to their manner of articulation.
They may be voiced or voiceless, oral or nasal, long or short. They may be stops,
fricatives, affricates, liquids, or glides. During the production of voiced sounds,
the vocal cords are together and vibrating, whereas in voiceless sounds they are
apart and not vibrating. Voiceless sounds may also be aspirated or unaspirated.
In the production of aspirated sounds, the vocal cords remain apart for a brief
time after the stop closure is released, resulting in a puff of air at the time of the
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
release. Consonants may be grouped according to certain features to form larger
classes such as labials, coronals, anteriors, and sibilants.
Vowels form the nucleus of syllables. They differ according to the position
of the tongue and lips: high, mid, or low tongue; front, central, or back of the
tongue; rounded or unrounded lips. The vowels in English may be tense or lax.
Tense vowels are slightly longer in duration than lax vowels. Vowels may also be
stressed (longer, higher in pitch, and louder) or unstressed. Vowels, like consonants, may be nasal or oral, although most vowels in all languages are oral.
Length, pitch, loudness, and stress are prosodic, or suprasegmental, features.
They are imposed over and above the segmental values of the sounds in a syllable. In many languages, the pitch of the vowel in the syllable is linguistically
significant. For example, two words with identical segments may contrast in
meaning if one has a high pitch and another a low pitch. Such languages are
tone languages. There are also intonation languages in which the rise and fall
of pitch may contrast meanings of sentences. In English the statement Mary is a
teacher will end with a fall in pitch, but in the question Mary is a teacher? the
pitch will rise.
English and other languages use stress to distinguish different words, such
as cóntent and contént. In some languages, long vowels and long consonants
contrast with their shorter counterparts. Thus biru [biru] and biiru [biːru], saki
[saki] and sakki [sakːi] are different words in Japanese.
Diacritics to specify such properties as nasalization, length, stress, and tone
may be combined with the phonetic symbols for more detailed phonetic transcriptions. A phonetic transcription of men would use a tilde diacritic to indicate
the nasalization of the vowel: [mɛ̃n].
In sign languages there are “phonetic” features analogous to those of spoken
languages. In ASL these are handshape, movement, and location. As in spoken
languages, changes along one of these parameters can result in a new word. In
the following chapter, we discuss this meaning-changing property of features in
much greater detail.
References for Further Reading
Catford, J. C. 2001. A practical introduction to phonetics, 2nd edn. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Crystal, D. 2003. A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics, 5th edn. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell Publishers.
Emmorey, K. 2002. Language, cognition and the brain: Insights from sign language
research. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Fromkin, V. A. (ed.). 1978. Tone: A linguistic survey. New York: Academic Press.
International Phonetic Association. 1989. Principles of the International Phonetic
Association, rev. edn. London: IPA.
Ladefoged, P. 2006. A course in phonetics, 5th edn. Boston, MA: Thomson Learning.
_____. 2005. Vowels and consonants, 2nd edn. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
Ladefoged, P., and I. Maddieson. 1996. The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford,
UK: Blackwell Publishers.
Pullum, G. K., and W. A. Ladusaw. 1986. Phonetic symbol guide. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Exercises
Exercises
1. Write the phonetic symbol for the first sound in each of the following
words according to the way you pronounce it.
Examples: ooze [u]
psycho
[s]
a. judge
[ ]
f. thought [ ]
b. Thomas
[ ]
g. contact
[ ]
c. though
[ ]
h. phone
[ ]
d. easy
[ ]
i. civic
[ ]
e. pneumonia
[ ]
j. usual
[ ]
2. Write the phonetic symbol for the last sound in each of the following
words.
Example: boy [ɔɪ] (Diphthongs should be treated as one sound.)
a. fleece [ ]
f. cow
[ ]
b. neigh
[ ]
g. rough
[ ]
c. long
[ ]
h. cheese
[ ]
d. health [ ]
i. bleached [ ]
e. watch [ ]
j. rags
[ ]
3. Write the following words in phonetic transcription, according to your
pronunciation.
Examples: knot [nat]; delightful [dilaɪtfəl] or [dəlaɪtfəl]. Some of you may
pronounce some of these words the same.
a. physics
h. Fromkin
o. touch
b. merry
i. tease
p. cough
c. marry
j. weather
q. larynx
d. Mary
k. coat
r. through
e. yellow
l. Rodman
s. beautiful
f. sticky
m. heath
t. honest
g. transcription
n. “your name”
u. president
4. Following is a phonetic transcription of a verse in the poem “The Walrus
and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll. The speaker who transcribed it may
not have exactly the same pronunciation as you; there are many correct versions. However, there is one major error in each line that is an impossible
pronunciation for any American English speaker. The error may consist of
an extra symbol, a missing symbol, or a wrong symbol in the word. Note
that the phonetic transcription that is given is a narrow transcription;
aspiration is marked, as is the nasalization of vowels. This is to illustrate
a detailed transcription. However, none of the errors involve aspiration or
nasalization of vowels.
Write the word in which the error occurs in the correct phonetic
transcription.
Corrected Word
a. ðə tʰãɪm hӕz cʌ̃m
[kʰʌ̃m]
b. ðə wɔlrəs sed
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
tʰu tʰɔlk əv mɛ̃ni θɪ ŋ̃ z
əv ʃuz ãnd ʃɪps
ӕ̃ nd silɪ ŋ̃ wӕx
əv kʰӕbəgəz ӕ̃ nd kʰɪ ŋ̃ z
ӕ̃ nd waɪ ðə si ɪs bɔɪlɪ ̃ ŋ hat
ӕ̃ nd wɛθər pʰɪgz hæv wɪ ŋ̃ z
5. The following are all English words written in a broad phonetic transcription (thus omitting details such as nasalization and aspiration). Write the
words using normal English orthography.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
m.
n.
o.
p.
q.
r.
s.
t.
[hit]
[strok]
[fez]
[ton]
[boni]
[skrim]
[frut]
[pritʃər]
[krak]
[baks]
[θæŋks]
[wɛnzde]
[krɔld]
[kantʃiɛntʃəs]
[parləmɛntæriən]
[kwəbɛk]
[pitsə]
[bərak obamə]
[dʒɔn məken]
[tu θaʊzənd ænd et]
6. Write the symbol that corresponds to each of the following phonetic
descriptions, then give an English word that contains this sound.
Example: voiced alveolar stop
a. voiceless bilabial unaspirated stop
b. low front vowel
c. lateral liquid
d. velar nasal
e. voiced interdental fricative
f. voiceless affricate
g. palatal glide
h. mid lax front vowel
i. high back tense vowel
j. voiceless aspirated alveolar stop
7.
[d] dough
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
In each of the following pairs of words, the bold italicized sounds differ by
one or more phonetic properties (features). Give the IPA symbol for each
italicized sound, state their differences and, in addition, state what properties they have in common.
Exercises
Example: phone—phonic
The o in phone is mid, tense, round.
The o in phonic is low, unround.
Both are back vowels.
a. bath—bathe
b. reduce—reduction
c. cool—cold
d. wife—wives
e. cats—dogs
f. impolite—indecent
8. Write a phonetic transcription of the italicized words in the following poem
entitled “Brush Up Your English” published long ago in a British newspaper.
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Some may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through?
So now you are ready, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead, it’s said like bed, not bead;
For goodness’ sake, don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat.
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.1
9. For each group of sounds listed, state the phonetic feature(s) they all share.
Example: [p] [b] [m] Features: bilabial, stop, consonant
a. [g] [p] [t] [d] [k] [b]
b. [u] [ʊ] [o] [ɔ]
c. [i] [ɪ] [e] [ɛ] [æ]
d. [t] [s] [ʃ] [p] [k] [tʃ] [f] [h]
e. [v] [z] [ʒ] [dʒ] [n] [g] [d] [b] [l] [r] [w] [j]
f. [t] [d] [s] [ʃ] [n] [tʃ] [dʒ]
10. Write the following broad phonetic transcriptions in regular English
spelling.
a. nom tʃamski ɪz e lɪngwɪst hu titʃəz æt ɛm aɪ ti
b. fənɛtɪks ɪz ðə stʌdi əv spitʃ saʊndz
c. ɔl spokən læŋgwɪdʒəz juz saʊndz prədust baɪ ðə ʌpər rɛspərətɔri sɪstəm
d. ɪn wʌn daɪəlɛkt əv ɪnglɪʃ kat ðə naʊn ænd kɔt ðə vərb ar prənaʊnst ðə sem
e. sʌm pipəl θɪŋk fənɛtɪks ɪz vɛri ɪntərɛstɪŋ
f. vɪktɔrijə framkən rabərt radmən ænd ninə haɪəmz ar ðə ɔθərz əv ðɪs bʊk
1T.
S. Watt, “Brush Up Your English,” Guardian, June 21, 1954. Reprinted by permission.
223
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CHAPTER 4 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
11. What phonetic property or feature distinguishes the sets of sounds in column A from those in column B?
A
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
B
[i] [ɪ]
[p] [t] [k] [s] [f]
[p] [b] [m]
[i] [ɪ] [u] [ʊ]
[f] [v] [s] [z] [ʃ] [ʒ]
[i] [ɪ] [e] [ə] [ɛ] [æ]
[u] [ʊ]
[b] [d] [g] [z] [v]
[t] [d] [n] [k] [g] [ŋ]
[e] [ɛ] [o] [ɔ] [æ] [a]
[tʃ] [dʒ]
[u] [ʊ] [o] [ɔ] [a]
12. Which of the following sound pairs have the same manner of articulation,
and what is that manner of articulation?
a. [h] [ʔ]
f. [f] [ʃ]
b. [r] [w]
g. [k] [θ]
c. [m] [ŋ]
h. [s] [g]
d. [ð] [v]
i. [j] [w]
e. [r] [t]
j. [j] [dʒ]
13. A. Which of the following vowels are lax and which are tense?
a. [i]
b. [ɪ]
c. [u]
d. [ʌ]
e. [ʊ]
f. [e]
g. [ɛ]
h. [o]
i. [ɔ]
j. [æ]
k. [a]
l. [ə]
m. [aɪ]
n. [aʊ]
o. [ɔɪ]
B. Think of ordinary, nonexclamatory English words with one syllable
that end in [ʃ] preceded directly by each of the vowels in A. Are any
such words impossible in English?
Example: fish [fɪʃ] is such a word. Words ending in [-aɪʃ] are not possible in English.
C. In terms of tense/lax, which vowel type is found in most such words?
14. Write a made-up sentence in narrow phonetic transcription that contains at
least six different monophthongal vowels and two different diphthongs.
15. The front vowels of English, [i, ɪ, e, ɛ, ӕ], are all unrounded. However,
many languages have rounded front vowels, such as French. Here are three
words in French with rounded front vowels. Transcribe them phonetically
by finding out the correct IPA symbols for front rounded vowels: (Hint: Try
one of the books given in the references, or Google around.)
a. tu, “you,” has a high front rounded vowel and is transcribed phonetically as [ ]
b. bleu, “blue,” has a midfront rounded vowel and is transcribed phonetically as [ ]
c. heure, “hour,” has a low midfront rounded vowel and is transcribed
phonetically as [ ]
16. Challenge exercise:
A. Take all of the vowels from 13A except the schwa and find a monosyllabic word containing that vowel followed directly by [t], giving both
the spelling and the phonetic transcription.
Exercises
Example: beat [bit], foot [fʊt]
B. Now do the same thing for monosyllabic words ending in [r]. Indicate
when such a word appears not to occur in your dialect of English.
C. And do the same thing for monosyllabic words ending in [ŋ]. Indicate
when such a word appears not to occur in your dialect of English.
D. Is there a quantitative difference in the number of examples found as
you go from A to C?
E. Are most vowels that “work” in B tense or lax? How about in C?
F. Write a brief summary of the difficulties you encountered in trying to
do this exercise.
17. In the first column are the last names of well-known authors. In the second
column is one of their best-known works. Match the work to the author
and write the author’s name and work in conventional spelling.
Example: a. [dɪkǝ̃nz]
1. [ɔləvər tʰwɪst]
Answer:
a—1 (Dickens, Oliver Twist)
b. [sɛrvãntɛs]
2. [ə ferwɛl tʰu armz]
c. [dãnte]
3. [æ̃ nǝ̃məl farm]
d. [dɪkǝ̃nz]
4. [dõn kihote]
e. [ɛliət]
5. [greps ʌv ræθ]
f. [hɛ̃mɪ ŋ̃ we]
6. [gret ɛkspɛktʰeʃǝ̃nz]
g. [hõmər]
7. [gʌləvərz tʰrævəlz]
h. [mɛlvɪl]
8. [hæ̃ mlət]
i. [orwɛl]
9. [mobi-dɪk]
j. [ʃekspir]
10. [saɪləs marnər]
k. [staɪ ñ bɛk]
11. [ðə dɪvaɪ ñ kʰãmədi]
l. [swɪft]
12. [ðə ɪliəd]
m. [tʰɔlstɔɪ]
13. [tʰãm sɔɪjər]
n. [tʰwẽn]
14. [wor æ̃ nd pʰis]
225
5
Phonology: The Sound
Patterns of Language
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead; therefore we must
learn both arts.
THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881)
Phonology is the study of telephone etiquette.
A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT
226
What do you think is greater: the number of languages in the world, or the
number of speech sounds in all those languages? Well, there are thousands of
languages, but only hundreds of speech sounds, some of which we examined
in the previous chapter. Even more remarkable, only a few dozen features, such
as voicing or bilabial or stop, are needed to describe every speech sound that
occurs in every human language.
That being the case, why, you may ask, do languages sound so different? One
reason is that the sounds form different patterns in different languages. English
has nasalized vowels, but only in syllables with nasal consonants. French puts
nasal vowels anywhere it pleases, with or without nasal consonants. The speech
sound that ends the word song—the velar nasal [ŋ]—cannot begin a word
in English, but it can in Vietnamese. The common Vietnamese name spelled
Nguyen begins with this sound, and the reason few of us can pronounce this
name correctly is that it doesn’t follow the English pattern.
The fact that a sound such as [ŋ] is difficult for an English speaker to pronounce at the beginning of a word, but easy for a Vietnamese speaker, means
that there is no general notion of “difficulty of articulation” that can explain all
The Pronunciation of Morphemes
of the sound patterns of particular languages. Rather, the ability to pronounce
particular sounds depends on the speaker’s unconscious knowledge of the sound
patterns of her own language or languages.
The study of how speech sounds form patterns is phonology. These patterns
may be as simple as the fact that the velar nasal cannot begin a syllable in English,
or as complex as why g is silent in sign but is pronounced in the related word signature. To see that this is a pattern and not a one-time exception, just consider
the slippery n in autumn and autumnal, or the b in bomb and bombard.
The word phonology refers both to the linguistic knowledge that speakers
have about the sound patterns of their language and to the description of that
knowledge that linguists try to produce. Thus it is like the way we defined grammar: your mental knowledge of your language, or a linguist’s description of that
knowledge.
Phonology tells you what sounds are in your language and which ones are foreign; it tells you what combinations of sounds could be an actual word, whether
it is (black) or isn’t (blick), and what combination of sounds could not be an
actual word (*lbick). It also explains why certain phonetic features are important to identifying a word, for example voicing in English as in pat versus bat,
while other features, such as aspiration in English, are not crucial to identifying
a word, as we noted in the previous chapter. And it also allows us to adjust our
pronunciation of a morpheme, for example the past or plural morpheme, to suit
the different phonological contexts that it occurs in, as we will discuss shortly.
In this chapter we’ll look at some of the phonological processes that you
know, that you acquired as a child, and that yet may initially appear to you to be
unreasonably complex. Keep in mind that we are only making explicit what you
already know, and its complexity is in a way a wondrous feature of your own
mind.
The Pronunciation of Morphemes
The t is silent, as in Harlow.
MARGOT ASQUITH, referring to her name being mispronounced by the actress
Jean Harlow
Knowledge of phonology determines how we pronounce words and the parts
of words we call morphemes. Often, certain morphemes are pronounced differently depending on their context, and we will introduce a way of describing this
variation with phonological rules. We begin with some examples from English,
and then move on to examples from other languages.
The Pronunciation of Plurals
Nearly all English nouns have a plural form: cat/cats, dog/dogs, fox/foxes. But
have you ever paid attention to how plural forms are pronounced? Listen to a
native speaker of English (or yourself if you are one) pronounce the plurals of the
following nouns.
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
A
B
C
D
cab
cad
bag
love
lathe
cam
can
call
bar
spa
boy
cap
cat
back
cuff
faith
bus
bush
buzz
garage
match
badge
child
ox
mouse
criterion
sheep
The final sound of the plural nouns from Column A is a [z]—a voiced alveolar
fricative. For column B the plural ending is an [s]—a voiceless alveolar fricative.
And for Column C it’s [әz]. Here is our first example of a morpheme with different pronunciations. Note also that there is a regularity in columns A, B, and C
that does not exist in D. The plural forms in D—children, oxen, mice, criteria,
and sheep—are a hodge-podge of special cases that are memorized individually
when you acquire English, whether natively or as a second language. This is
because there is no way to predict the plural forms of these words.
How do we know how to pronounce this plural morpheme? The spelling,
which adds s or es, is misleading—not a z in sight—yet if you know English, you
pronounce it as we indicated. When faced with this type of question, it’s useful
to make a chart that records the phonological environments in which each variant of the morpheme is known to occur. (The more technical term for a variant
is allomorph.) Writing the words from the first three columns in broad phonetic
transcription, we have our first chart for the plural morpheme.
Allomorph
Environment
[z]
After [kæb], [kæd], [bæg], [lʌv], [leð], [kæm], [kæn], [bæŋ],
[kɔl], [bar], [spa], [bɔɪ], e.g., [kæbz], [kædz] . . . [bɔɪz]
[s]
After [kæp], [kæt], [bæk], [kʌf], [feθ], e.g., [kæps], [kæts] . . .
[feθs]
[əz]
After [bʌs], [bʊʃ], [bʌz], [gəraʒ], [mætʃ], [bædʒ], e.g., [bʌsəz],
[bʊʃəz] . . . [bædʒəz]
To discover the pattern behind the way plurals are pronounced, we look for
some property of the environment associated with each group of allomorphs.
For example, what is it about [kæb] or [lʌv] that determines that the plural morpheme will take the form [z] rather than [s] or [əz]?
To guide our search, we look for minimal pairs in our list of words. A minimal pair is two words with different meanings that are identical except for one
sound segment that occurs in the same place in each word. For example, cab
[kæb] and cad [kæd] are a minimal pair that differ only in their final segments,
whereas cat [kæt] and mat [mæt] are a minimal pair that differ only in their
The Pronunciation of Morphemes
initial segments. Other minimal pairs in our list include cap/cab, bag/back, and
bag/badge.
Minimal pairs whose members take different allomorphs are particularly
useful for our search. For example, consider cab [kæb] and cap [kæp], which
respectively take the allomorphs [z] and [s] to form the plural. Clearly, the final
segment is responsible, because that is where the two words differ. Similarly for
bag [bæg] and badge [bædʒ]. Their final segments determine the different plural
allomorphs [z] and [əz].
Apparently, the distribution of plural allomorphs in English is conditioned
by the final segment of the singular form. We can make our chart more concise
by considering just the final segment. (We treat diphthongs such as [ɔɪ] as single
segments.)
Allomorph
Environment
[z]
[s]
[əz]
After [b], [d], [g], [v], [ð], [m], [n], [ŋ], [l], [r], [a], [ɔɪ]
After [p], [t], [k], [f], [θ]
After [s], [ʃ], [z], [ʒ] , [tʃ], [dʒ]
We now want to understand why the English plural follows this pattern. We
always answer questions of this type by inspecting the phonetic properties of the
conditioning segments. Such an inspection reveals that the segments that trigger
the [əz] plural have in common the property of being sibilants. Of the nonsibilants, the voiceless segments take the [s] plural, and the voiced segments take the
[z] plural. Now the rules can be stated in more general terms:
Allomorph
Environment
[z]
[s]
[əz]
After voiced nonsibilant segments
After voiceless nonsibilant segments
After sibilant segments
An even more concise way to express these rules is to assume that the basic or
underlying form of the plural morpheme is /z/, with the meaning “plural.” This is
the “default” pronunciation. The rules tell us when the default does not apply:
1.
2.
Insert a [ə] before the plural morpheme /z/ when a regular noun ends in a
sibilant, giving [əz].
Change the plural morpheme /z/ to a voiceless [s] when preceded by a
voiceless sound.
These rules will derive the phonetic forms—that is, the pronunciations—of plurals for all regular nouns. Because the basic form of the plural is /z/, if no rule
applies, then the plural morpheme will be realized as [z]. The following chart
shows how the plurals of bus, butt, and bug are formed. At the top are the basic
forms. The two rules apply or not as appropriate as one moves downward. The
output of rule 1 becomes the input of rule 2. At the bottom are the phonetic
realizations—the way the words are pronounced.
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
bus 1 pl.
Basic
representation
\bØs 1 z\
Apply rule (1)
Apply rule (2)
NA
Phonetic
representation
[bØsEz]
butt 1 pl.
E
bug 1 pl.
\bØt 1 z\
\bØg 1 z\
NA*
NA
s
NA
[bØts]
[bØgz]
*NA means “not applicable.”
As we have formulated these rules, (1) must apply before (2). If we applied the
rules in reverse order, we would derive an incorrect phonetic form for the plural
of bus, as a diagram similar to the previous one illustrates:
Basic representation
Apply rule (2)
Apply rule (1)
Phonetic representation
\bØs 1 z\
s
E
*[bØsEs]
The particular phonological rules that determine the phonetic form of the
plural morpheme and other morphemes of the language are morphophonemic
rules. Such rules concern the pronunciation of specific morphemes. Thus the
plural morphophonemic rules apply to the plural morpheme specifically, not to
all morphemes in English.
Additional Examples of Allomorphs
The formation of the regular past tense of English verbs parallels the formation of regular plurals. Like plurals, some irregular past tenses conform to no
particular rule and must be learned individually, such as go/went, sing/sang,
and hit/hit. And also like plurals, there are three phonetic past-tense morphemes
for regular verbs: [d], [t], and [əd]. Here are several examples in broad phonetic
transcription. Study sets A, B, and C and try to see the regularity before reading
further.
Set A:
gloat [glot], gloated [glotəd]; raid [red], raided [redəd]
Set B:
grab [græb], grabbed [græbd]; hug [hʌg], hugged [hʌgd]; faze [fez],
fazed [fezd]; roam [rom], roamed [romd].
Set C:
reap [rip], reaped [ript]; poke [pok], poked [pokt]; kiss [kɪs], kissed
[kɪst]; patch [pætʃ], patched [pætʃt]
Set A suggests that if the verb ends in a [t] or a [d] (i.e., non-nasal alveolar stops),
[əd] is added to form the past tense, similar to the insertion of [əz] to form the
The Pronunciation of Morphemes
plural of nouns that end in sibilants. Set B suggests that if the verb ends in a
voiced segment other than [d], you add a voiced [d]. Set C shows us that if the
verb ends in voiceless segment other than [t], you add a voiceless [t].
Just as /z/ was the basic form of the plural morpheme, /d/ is the basic form of
the past-tense morpheme, and the rules for past-tense formation of regular verbs
are much like the rules for the plural formation of regular nouns. These are also
morphophonemic rules as they apply specifically to the past-tense morpheme
/d/. As with the plural rules, the output of Rule 1, if any, provides the input to
Rule 2, and the rules must be applied in order.
1.
2.
Insert a [ə] before the past-tense morpheme when a regular verb ends in a
non-nasal alveolar stop, giving [əd].
Change the past-tense morpheme to a voiceless [t] when a voiceless sound
precedes it.
Two further allomorphs in English are the possessive morpheme and the thirdperson singular morpheme, spelled s or es. These morphemes take on the same
phonetic form as the plural morpheme according to the same rules! Add [s]
to ship to get ship’s; add [z] to woman to get woman’s; and add [əz] to judge
to get judge’s. Similarly for the verbs eat, need, and rush, whose third-person
singular forms are eats with a final [s], needs with a final [z], and rushes with
a final [əz].
That the rules of phonology are based on properties of segments rather than
on individual words is one of the factors that makes it possible for young children to learn their native language in a relatively short period. The young child
doesn’t need to learn each plural, each past tense, each possessive form, and each
verb ending, on a noun-by-noun or verb-by-verb basis. Once the rule is learned,
thousands of word forms are automatically known. And as we will see when
we discuss language development in chapter 7, children give clear evidence of
learning morphophonemic rules such as the plural rules by applying the rule
too broadly and producing forms such as mouses, mans, and so on, which are
ungrammatical in the adult language.
English is not the only language that has morphemes that are pronounced differently in different phonological environments. Most languages have morpheme
variation that can be described by rules similar to the ones we have written
for English. For example, the negative morpheme in the West African language
Akan has three nasal allomorphs: [m] before p, [n] before t, and [ŋ] before k, as
the following examples show ([mɪ] means “I”):
mɪ pɛ
mɪ tɪ
mɪ kɔ
“I like”
“I speak”
“I go”
mɪ mpɛ “I don’t like”
mɪ ntɪ
“I don’t speak”
mɪ ŋkɔ “I don’t go”
The rule that describes the distribution of allomorphs is:
Change the place of articulation of the nasal negative morpheme to agree
with the place of articulation of a following consonant.
The rule that changes the pronunciation of nasal consonants as just illustrated
is called the homorganic nasal rule—homorganic means “same place”—because
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the place of articulation of the nasal is the same as for the following consonant.
The homorganic nasal rule is a common rule in the world’s languages.
Phonemes: The Phonological
Units of Language
In the physical world the naive speaker and hearer actualize and are sensitive to sounds,
but what they feel themselves to be pronouncing and hearing are “phonemes.”
EDWARD SAPIR, “The Psychological Reality of Phonemes,” 1933
The phonological rules discussed in the preceding section apply only to particular morphemes. However, other phonological rules apply to sounds as they
occur in any morpheme in the language. These rules express our knowledge
about the sound patterns of the entire language.
This section introduces the notions of phoneme and allophone. Phonemes
are what we have been calling the basic form of a sound and are sensed in your
mind rather than spoken or heard. Each phoneme has associated with it one or
more sounds, called allophones, which represent the actual sound corresponding to the phoneme in various environments. For example, the phoneme /p/ is
pronounced with the aspiration allophone [pʰ] in pit but without aspiration [p]
in spit. Phonological rules operate on phonemes to make explicit which allophones are pronounced in which environments.
Vowel Nasalization in English as
an Illustration of Allophones
English contains a general phonological rule that determines the contexts in
which vowels are nasalized. In chapter 4 we noted that both oral and nasal vowels occur phonetically in English. The following examples show this:
bean
roam
[bĩn]
[rõm]
bead
robe
[bid]
[rob]
Taking oral vowels as basic—that is, as the phonemes—we have a phonological rule that states:
Vowels are nasalized before a nasal consonant within the same syllable.
This rule expresses your knowledge of English pronunciation: nasalized vowels
occur only before nasal consonants and never elsewhere. The effect of this rule
is exemplified in Table 5.1.
As the examples in Table 5.1 illustrate, oral vowels in English occur in final
position and before non-nasal consonants; nasalized vowels occur only before
nasal consonants. The nonwords (starred) show us that nasalized vowels do not
occur finally or before non-nasal consonants, nor do oral vowels occur before
nasal consonants.
Phonemes: The Phonological Units of Language
TABLE 5.1 | Nasal and Oral Vowels: Words and Nonwords
Words
be
[bi]
bead
lay
[le]
baa
[bæ]
Nonwords
[bid]
bean
[bĩn]
*[bĩ]
*[bĩd]
*[bin]
lace
[les]
lame
[lẽm]
*[lẽ]
*[lẽs]
*[lem]
bad
[bæd]
bang
[bæ̃ŋ]
*[bæ̃]
*[bæ̃d]
*[bæŋ]
You may be unaware of this variation in your vowel production, but this is
natural. Whether you speak or hear the vowel in bean with or without nasalization does not matter. Without nasalization, it might sound a bit strange, as if
you had a foreign accent, but bean pronounced [bĩn] and bean pronounced [bin]
would convey the same word. Likewise, if you pronounced bead as [bĩd], with
a nasalized vowel, someone might suspect you had a cold, or that you spoke
nasally, but the word would remain bead. Because nasalization is an inessential
difference insofar as what the word actually is, we tend to be unaware of it.
Contrast this situation with a change in vowel height. If you intend to say
bead but say bad instead, that makes a difference. The [i] in bead and the [æ]
in bad are sounds from different phonemes. Substitute one for another and you
get a different word (or no word). The [i] in bead and the [ĩ] in the nasalized
bead do not make a difference in meaning. These two sounds, then, belong to
the same phoneme, an abstract high front vowel that we denote between slashes
as /i/.
Phonemes are not physical sounds. They are abstract mental representations
of the phonological units of a language, the units used to represent words in our
mental lexicon. The phonological rules of the language apply to phonemes to
determine the pronunciation of words.
The process of substituting one sound for another in a word to see if it makes
a difference is a good way to identify the phonemes of a language. Here are
twelve words differing only in their vowel:
beat
bit
bait
bet
bat
bite
[bit]
[bɪt]
[bet]
[bɛt]
[bæt]
[baɪt]
[i]
[ɪ]
[e]
[ɛ]
[æ]
[aɪ]
boot
but
boat
bought
bout
bot
[but]
[bʌt]
[bot]
[bɔt]
[baʊt]
[bat]
[u]
[ʌ]
[o]
[ɔ]
[aʊ]
[a]
Any two of these words form a minimal pair: two different words that differ in
one sound. The two sounds that cause the word difference belong to different
phonemes. The pair [bid] and [bĩd] are not different words; they are variants of
the same word. Therefore, [i] and [ĩ] do not belong to different phonemes. They
are two actualizations of the same phoneme.
From the minimal set of [b–t] words we can infer that English has at least
twelve vowel phonemes. (We consider diphthongs to function as single vowel
sounds.) To that total we can add a phoneme corresponding to [ʊ] resulting from
minimal pairs such as book [bʊk] and beak [bik]; and we can add one for [ɔɪ]
resulting from minimal pairs such as boy [bɔɪ] and buy [baɪ].
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Our minimal pair analysis has revealed eleven monophthongal and three diphthongal vowel phonemes, namely, /i ɪ e ɛ æ u ʊ o ɔ a ʌ/ and /aɪ/, /aʊ/, /ɔɪ/. (This set
may differ slightly in other variants of English.) Importantly, each of these vowel
phonemes has (at least) two allophones (i.e., two ways of being pronounced:
orally as [i], [ɪ], [e], etc., and nasally as [ĩ], [ĩ], [ẽ], etc.), as determined by the
phonological rule of nasalization.
A particular realization (pronunciation) of a phoneme is called a phone. The
collection of phones that are the realizations of the same phoneme are called the
allophones of that phoneme. In English, each vowel phoneme has both an oral
and a nasalized allophone. The choice of the allophone is not random or haphazard; it is rule-governed.
To distinguish between a phoneme and its allophones, we use slashes / / to
enclose phonemes and continue to use square brackets [ ] for allophones or
phones. For example, [i] and [ĩ] are allophones of the phoneme /i/; [ɪ] and [ĩ] are
allophones of the phoneme /ɪ/, and so on. Thus we will represent bead and bean
phonemically as /bid/ and /bin/. We refer to these as phonemic transcriptions of
the two words. The rule for the distribution of oral and nasal vowels in English
shows that phonetically these words will be pronounced as [bid] and [bĩn]. The
pronunciations are indicated by phonetic transcriptions, and written between
square brackets.
Allophones of /t/
Copyright © Don Addis.
Phonemes: The Phonological Units of Language
Consonants, too, have allophones whose distribution is rule-governed. For /t/
the following examples illustrate the point.
tick [tʰɪk]
stick [stɪk]
hits [hɪts]
bitter [bɪɾər]
In tick we normally find an aspirated [tʰ], whereas in stick and hits we find an
unaspirated [t], and in bitter we find the flap [ɾ]. As with vowel nasalization,
swapping these sounds around will not change word meaning. If we pronounce
bitter with a [tʰ], it will not change the word; it will simply sound unnatural (to
most Americans).
We account for this knowledge of how t is pronounced by positing a phoneme
/t/ with three allophones [tʰ], [t], and [ɾ]. We also posit phonological rules, which
roughly state that the aspirated [tʰ] occurs before a stressed vowel, the unaspirated [t] occurs directly before or after /s/, and the flap [ɾ] occurs between a
stressed vowel and an unstressed vowel.
Whether we pronounce tick as [tʰɪk], [tɪk], or [ɾɪk], we are speaking the same
word, however strangely pronounced. The allophones of a phoneme do not contrast. If we change the voicing and say Dick, or the manner of articulation and
say sick, or the nasalization and say nick, we get different words. Those sounds
do contrast. Tick, Dick, sick, and nick thus form a minimal set that shows us
that there are phonemes /t/, /d/, /s/, and /n/ in English. We may proceed in this
manner to discover other phonemes by considering pick, kick, Mick (as in Jagger), Vic, thick, chick, lick, and Rick to infer the phonemes /p/, /k/, /m/, /v/, /θ/, /tʃ/,
/l/, and /r/. By finding other minimal pairs and sets, we would discover yet more
consonant phonemes such as /ð/, which, together with /θ/, contrasts the words
thy and thigh, or either and ether.
Each of these phonemes has its own set of allophones, even if that set consists
of a single phone, which would mean there is only one pronunciation in all environments. Most phonemes have more than one allophone, and the phonological
rules dictate when the different allophones occur. It should be clear at this point
that pronunciation is not a random process. It is systematic and rule-governed,
and while the systems and the rules may appear complex, they are no more than
a compendium of the knowledge that every speaker has.
Complementary Distribution
Minimal pairs illustrate that some speech sounds in a language are contrastive
and can be used to make different words such as big and dig. These contrastive
sounds group themselves into the phonemes of that language. Some sounds are
non-contrastive and cannot be used to make different words. The sounds [t]
and [ɾ] were cited as examples that do not contrast in English, so [raɪtər] and
[raɪɾər] are not a minimal pair, but rather alternate ways in which writer may be
pronounced.
Oral and nasal vowels in English are also non-contrastive sounds. What’s
more, the oral and nasal allophones of each vowel phoneme never occur in the
same phonological context, as Table 5.2 illustrates.
Where oral vowels occur, nasal vowels do not occur, and vice versa. In this
sense the phones are said to complement each other or to be in complementary
distribution. By and large, the allophones of a phoneme are in complementary
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TABLE 5.2 | Distribution of Oral and Nasal Vowels in English Syllables
In Final Position
Oral vowels
Nasal vowels
Yes
No
Before Nasal Consonants
Before Oral Consonants
No
Yes
Yes
No
distribution—never occurring in identical environments. Complementary distribution is a fundamental concept of phonology, and interestingly enough, it
shows up in everyday life. Here are a couple of examples that draw on the common experience of reading and writing English.
The first example focuses on printed letters such as those that appear on the
pages of this book. Each printed letter of English has two main variants: lowercase and uppercase (or capital). If we restrict our attention to words that are not
proper names or acronyms (such as Ron or UNICEF), we can formulate a simple
rule that does a fair job of determining how letters will be printed:
A letter is printed in uppercase if it is the first letter of a sentence; otherwise,
it is printed in lowercase.
Even ignoring names and acronyms, this rule is only approximately right, but
let’s go with it anyway. It helps to explain why written sentences such as the following appear so strange:
phonology is the study of the sound patterns of human languageS.
pHONOLOGY iS tHE sTUDY oF tHE sOUND pATTERNS oF hUMAN
lANGUAGES.
These “sentences” violate the rule in funny ways, despite that they are comprehensible, just as the pronunciation of bead with a nasal [ĩ] as [bĩd] would
sound funny but be understood.
To the extent that the rule is correct, the lowercase and uppercase variants
of an English letter are in complementary distribution. The uppercase variant
occurs in one particular context (namely, at the beginning of the sentence), and
the lowercase variant occurs in every other context (or elsewhere). Therefore,
just as every English vowel phoneme has an oral and a nasalized allophone that
occurs in different spoken contexts, every letter of the English alphabet has two
variants, or allographs, that occur in different written contexts. In both cases,
the two variants of a single mental representation (phoneme or letter) are in
complementary distribution because they never appear in the same environment. And, substituting one for the other—a nasal vowel in place of an oral one,
or an uppercase letter in place of a lowercase one—may sound or look unusual,
but it will not change the meaning of what is spoken or written.
Superman and Clark Kent, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—for those of you
familiar with these fictional characters—are in complementary distribution
with respect to time. At a given moment in time, the individual is either one or
another of his alter egos.
Our next example turns to cursive handwriting, which you are likely to have
learned in elementary school. Writing in cursive is in one sense more similar to
the act of speaking than printing is, because in cursive writing each letter of a
Phonemes: The Phonological Units of Language
word (usually) connects to the following letter—just as adjacent sounds connect
during speech. The following figure illustrates that the connections between the
letters of a word in cursive writing create different variants of a letter in different
environments:
Compare how the letter l appears after a g (as in glue) and after a b (as in
blue). In the first case, the l begins near the bottom of the line, but in the second
case, the l begins near the middle of the line (which is indicated by the dashes).
In other words, the same letter l has two variants. It doesn’t matter where the
l begins, it’s still an l. Likewise, it doesn’t matter whether a vowel in English is
nasalized or not, it’s still that vowel. Which variant occurs in a particular word
is determined by the immediately preceding letter. The variant that begins near
the bottom of the line appears after letters like g that end near the bottom of
the line. The variant that begins near the middle of the line appears after letters
like b that end near the middle of the line. The two variants of l are therefore in
complementary distribution.
This pattern of complementary distribution is not specific to l but occurs for
other cursive letters in English. By examining the pairs sat and vat, mill and will,
and rack and rock, you can see the complementary distribution of the variants
of a, i, and c, respectively. In each case, the immediately preceding letter determines which variant occurs, with the consequence that the variants of a given
letter are in complementary distribution.
We turn now to a general discussion of phonemes and allophones. When
sounds are in complementary distribution, they do not contrast with each other.
The replacement of one sound for the other will not change the meaning of the
word, although it might not sound like typical English pronunciation. Given
these facts about the patterning of sounds in a language, a phoneme can be
defined as a set of phonetically similar sounds that are in complementary distribution. A set may consist of only one member. Some phonemes are represented
by only one sound; they have one allophone. When there is more than one allophone in the set, the phones must be phonetically similar; that is, share most
phonetic features. In English, the velar nasal [ŋ] and the glottal fricative [h] are
in complementary distribution; [ŋ] does not occur word initially and [h] does
not occur word finally. But they share very few phonetic features; [ŋ] is a voiced
velar nasal stop; [h] is a voiceless glottal fricative. Therefore, they are not allophones of the same phoneme; [ŋ] and [h] are allophones of different phonemes.
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
Speakers of a language generally perceive the different allophones of a single
phoneme as the same sound or phone. For example, most speakers of English
are unaware that the vowels in bead and bean are different phones because mentally, speakers produce and hear phonemes, not phones.
Distinctive Features of Phonemes
We are generally not aware of the phonetic properties or features that distinguish the phonemes of our language. Phonetics provides the means to describe
the phones (sounds) of language, showing how they are produced and how they
vary. Phonology tells us how various sounds form patterns to create phonemes
and their allophones.
For two phones to contrast meaning, there must be some phonetic difference
between them. The minimal pairs seal [sil] and zeal [zil] show that [s] and [z]
represent two contrasting phonemes in English. They cannot be allophones of
one phoneme because one cannot replace the [s] with the [z] without changing
the meaning of the word. Furthermore, they are not in complementary distribution; both occur word initially before the vowel [i]. They are therefore allophones of the two different phonemes /s/ and /z/. From the discussion of phonetics in chapter 4, we know that [s] and [z] differ in voicing: [s] is voiceless and [z]
is voiced. The phonetic feature of voicing therefore distinguishes the two words.
Voicing also distinguishes feel and veal [f]/[v] and cap and cab [p]/[b]. When a
feature distinguishes one phoneme from another, hence one word from another,
it is a distinctive feature or, equivalently, a phonemic feature.
Feature Values
One can think of voicing and voicelessness as the presence or absence of a single
feature, voiced. This single feature may have two values: plus (+), which signifies its presence, and minus (–), which signifies its absence. For example, [b] is
[+voiced] and [p] is [–voiced].
The presence or absence of nasality can similarly be designated as [+nasal] or
[–nasal], with [m] being [+nasal] and [b] and [p] being [–nasal]. A [–nasal] sound
is an oral sound.
We consider the phonetic and phonemic symbols to be cover symbols for sets
of distinctive features. They are a shorthand method of specifying the phonetic
properties of the segment. Phones and phonemes are not indissoluble units; they
are composed of phonetic features, similar to the way that molecules are composed of atoms. A more explicit description of the phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/
may thus be given in a feature matrix of the following sort.
Stop
Labial
Voiced
Nasal
p
b
m
+
+
–
–
+
+
+
–
+
+
+
+
Aspiration is not listed as a phonemic feature in the specification of these units,
because it is not necessary to include both [p] and [pʰ] as phonemes. In a pho-
Distinctive Features of Phonemes
netic transcription, however, the aspiration feature would be specified where it
occurs.
A phonetic feature is distinctive when the + value of that feature in certain
words contrasts with the – value of that feature in other words. At least one
feature value difference must distinguish each phoneme from all the other phonemes in a language.
Because the phonemes /b/, /d/, and /g/ contrast by virtue of their place of
articulation features—labial, alveolar, and velar—these place features are also
distinctive in English. Because uvular sounds do not occur in English, the place
feature uvular is not distinctive. The distinctive features of the voiced stops in
English are shown in the following:
Stop
Voiced
Labial
Alveolar
Velar
Nasal
b
m
d
n
g
ŋ
+
+
+
–
–
–
+
+
+
–
–
+
+
+
–
+
–
–
+
+
–
+
–
+
+
+
–
–
+
–
+
+
–
–
+
+
Each phoneme in this chart differs from all the other phonemes by at least one
distinctive feature.
Vowels, too, have distinctive features. For example, the feature [±back] distinguishes the vowel in rock [rak] ([+back]) from the vowel in rack [ræk] ([–back]),
among others, and is therefore distinctive. Similarly, [±tense] distinguishes [i]
from [ɪ] (beat versus bit), among others, and is also a distinctive feature of the
vowel system.
Nondistinctive Features
We have seen that nasality is a distinctive feature of English consonants, but it
is a nondistinctive feature for English vowels. Given the arbitrary relationship
between form and meaning, there is no way to predict that the word meat begins
with a nasal bilabial stop [m] and that the word beat begins with an oral bilabial stop [b]. You learn this when you learn the words. On the other hand, the
nasality feature value of the vowels in bean, mean, comb, and sing is predictable
because they occur before nasal consonants. When a feature value is predictable
by rule for a certain class of sounds, the feature is a nondistinctive or redundant or predictable feature for that class. (The three terms are equivalent.) Thus
nasality is a redundant feature in English vowels, but a nonredundant (distinctive or phonemic) feature for English consonants.
This is not the case in all languages. In French, nasality is a distinctive feature
for both vowels and consonants: gars (pronounced [ga]) “lad” contrasts with gant
[gã], which means “glove”; and bal [bal] “dance” contrasts with mal [mal] “bad.”
Thus, French has both oral and nasal consonant phonemes and vowel phonemes;
English has oral and nasal consonant phonemes, but only oral vowel phonemes.
Like French, the African language Akan (spoken in Ghana) has nasal vowel
phonemes. Nasalization is a distinctive feature for vowels in Akan, as the following examples illustrate:
239
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
[ka]
[fi]
[tu]
[nsa]
[tʃi]
[pam]
“bite”
“come from”
“pull”
“hand”
“hate”
“sew”
[kã]
[fĩ]
[tũ]
[nsã]
[tʃĩ]
[pãm]
“speak”
“dirty”
“den”
“liquor”
“squeeze”
“confederate”
Nasalization is not predictable in Akan as it is in English. There is no nasalization rule in Akan, as shown by the minimal pair [pam] and [pãm]. If you substitute an oral vowel for a nasal vowel, or vice versa, you will change the word.
Two languages may have the same phonetic segments (phones) but have two
different phonemic systems. Phonetically, both oral and nasalized vowels exist
in English and Akan. However, English does not have nasalized vowel phonemes, but Akan does. The same phonetic segments function differently in the
two languages. Nasalization of vowels in English is redundant and nondistinctive; nasalization of vowels in Akan is nonredundant and distinctive.
Another nondistinctive feature in English is aspiration. In chapter 4 we
pointed out that in English both aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops occur.
The voiceless aspirated stops [pʰ], [tʰ], and [kʰ] and the voiceless unaspirated
stops [p], [t], and [k] are in complementary distribution in English, as shown in
the following:
Syllable Initial before
a Stressed Vowel
After a Syllable
Initial /s/
[pʰ]
pill
[pʰɪl]
par
[tʰ]
till
[tʰɪl]
tar
[kʰ]
kill
[kʰɪl]
car
[p]
spill
[spɪl]
spar
[t]
still
[stɪl]
star
[k]
skill
[skɪl]
scar
[pɪl]*
[spʰɪl]*
[par]*
[tɪl]*
[stʰɪl]*
[tar]*
[kɪl]*
[skʰɪl]*
[kar]*
[pʰar]
[tʰar]
[kʰar]
[spar]
[star]
[skar]
[spʰar]*
[stʰar]*
[skʰar]*
Nonword*
Where the unaspirated stops occur, the aspirated ones do not, and vice versa. If
you wanted to, you could say spit with an aspirated [pʰ], as [spʰɪt], and it would
be understood as spit, but listeners would probably think you were spitting out
your words. Given this distribution, we see that aspiration is a redundant, nondistinctive feature in English; aspiration is predictable, occurring as a feature of
voiceless stops when they occur initially in a stressed syllable.
This is the reason speakers of English usually perceive the [pʰ] in pill and
the [p] in spill to be the same sound, just as they consider the [i] and [ĩ] that
represent the phoneme /i/ in bead and bean to be the same. They do so because
the difference between them is predictable, redundant, nondistinctive, and nonphonemic (all equivalent terms). This example illustrates why we refer to the
phoneme as an abstract unit or as a mental unit. We do not utter phonemes;
we produce phones, the allophones of the phonemes of the language. In English
/p/ is a phoneme that is realized phonetically (pronounced) as both [p] and [pʰ],
depending on context. The phones or sounds [p] and [pʰ] are allophones of the
phoneme /p/.
Distinctive Features of Phonemes
Phonemic Patterns May Vary across Languages
The tongue of man is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there
of every kind, the range of words is wide, and their variance.
HOMER, The Iliad, c. 900 b.c.e.
We have seen that the same phones may occur in two languages but pattern differently because the phonologies are different. English, French, and Akan have
oral and nasal vowel phones; in English, oral and nasal vowels are allophones of
one phoneme, whereas in French and Akan they represent distinct phonemes.
Aspiration of voiceless stops further illustrates the asymmetry of the phonological systems of different languages. Both aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops
occur in English and Thai, but they function differently in the two languages.
Aspiration in English is not a distinctive feature because its presence or absence is
predictable. In Thai it is not predictable, as the following examples show:
Voiceless Unaspirated
Voiceless Aspirated
[paa]
[tam]
[kat]
[pʰaa]
[tʰam]
[kʰat]
forest
to pound
to bite
to split
to do
to interrupt
The voiceless unaspirated and the voiceless aspirated stops in Thai occur in minimal pairs; they contrast and are therefore phonemes. In both English and Thai,
the phones [p], [t], [k], [pʰ], [tʰ], and [kʰ] occur. In English they represent the phonemes /p/, /t/, and /k/; in Thai they represent the phonemes /p/, /t/, /k/, /pʰ/, /tʰ/, and
/kʰ/. Aspiration is a distinctive feature in Thai; it is a nondistinctive redundant
feature in English.
The phonetic facts alone do not reveal what is distinctive or phonemic:
The phonetic representation of utterances shows what speakers know about
the pronunciation of sounds.
The phonemic representation of utterances shows what speakers know about
the patterning of sounds.
That pot/pat and spot/spat are phonemically transcribed with an identical
/p/ reveals the fact that English speakers consider the [pʰ] in pot [pʰat] and the
[p] in spot [spat] to be phonetic manifestations of the same phoneme /p/. This is
also reflected in spelling, which is more attuned to phonemes than to individual
phones.
In English, vowel length and consonant length are nonphonemic. Prolonging
a sound in English will not produce a different word. In other languages, long
and short vowels that are identical except for length are phonemic. In such languages, length is a nonpredictable distinctive feature. For example, vowel length
is phonemic in Korean, as shown by the following minimal pairs (recall that the
colon-like symbol ː indicates length):
il
seda
kul
“day”
“to count”
“oyster”
iːl
seːda
kuːl
“work”
“strong”
“tunnel”
241
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
In Italian the word for “grandfather” is nonno /nonːo/, which contrasts with
the word for “ninth,” which is nono /nono/, so consonant length is phonemic in
Italian. In Luganda, an African language, consonant length is also phonemic:
/kula/ with a short /k/ means “grow up,” whereas /kːula/ with a long /kː/ means
“treasure.” Thus consonant length is unpredictable in Luganda, just as whether
a word begins with a /b/ or a /p/ is unpredictable in English.
ASL Phonology
As discussed in chapter 4, signs can be broken down into smaller units that are
in many ways analogous to the phonemes and distinctive features in spoken languages. They can be decomposed into location, movement, and handshape and
there are minimal pairs that are distinguished by a change in one or another of
these features. Figure 4.6 in chapter 4 provides some examples. The signs meaning “candy,” “apple,” and “jealous” are articulated at the same location on the
face and involve the same movement, but contrast minimally in hand configuration. “Summer,” “ugly,” and “dry” are a minimal set contrasting only in place
of articulation, and “tape,” “chair,” and “train” contrast only in movement.
Thus signs can be decomposed into smaller minimal units that contrast meaning. Some features are non-distinctive. Whether a sign is articulated on the right
or left hand does not affect its meaning.
Natural Classes of Speech Sounds
It’s as large as life, and twice as natural!
LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
We show what speakers know about the predictable aspects of speech through
phonological rules. In English, these rules determine the environments in which
vowels are nasalized or voiceless stops aspirated. These rules apply to all the
words in the language, and even apply to made-up words such as sint, peeg, or
sparg, which would be /sɪnt/, /pig/, and /sparg/ phonemically and [sĩnt], [pʰig], and
[sparg] phonetically.
The more linguists examine the phonologies of the world’s languages, the
more they find that similar phonological rules involve the same classes of sounds
such as nasals or voiceless stops. For example, many languages besides English
have a rule that nasalizes vowels before nasal consonants:
Nasalize a vowel when it precedes a nasal consonant in the same syllable.
The rule will apply to all vowel phonemes when they occur in a context preceding any segment marked [+nasal] in the same syllable, and will add the feature
[+nasal] to the feature matrix of the vowel. Our description of vowel nasalization
in English needs only this rule. It need not include a list of the individual vowels
to which the rule applies or a list of the sounds that result from its application.
Many languages have rules that refer to [+voiced] and [–voiced] sounds. For
example, the aspiration rule in English applies to the class of [–voiced] noncontinuant sounds in word-initial position. As in the vowel nasality rule, we do not
Distinctive Features of Phonemes
need to consider individual segments. The rule automatically applies to initial
/p/, /t/, /k/, and /tʃ/.
Phonological rules often apply to natural classes of sounds. A natural class
is a group of sounds described by a small number of distinctive features such
as [–voiced], [–continuant], which describe /p/, /t/, /k/, and /tʃ/. Any individual
member of a natural class would require more features in its description than the
class itself, so /p/ is not only [–voiced], [–continuant], but also [+labial].
The relationships among phonological rules and natural classes illustrate why
segments are to be regarded as bundles of features. If segments were not specified as feature matrices, the similarities among /p/, /t/, /k/ or /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ would be
lost. It would be just as likely for a language to have a rule such as
1.
Nasalize vowels before p, i, or z.
as to have a rule such as
2.
Nasalize vowels before m, n, or ŋ.
Rule 1 has no phonetic explanation, whereas Rule 2 does: the lowering of the
velum in anticipation of a following nasal consonant causes the vowel to be
nasalized. In Rule 1, the environment is a motley collection of unrelated sounds
that cannot be described with a few features. Rule 2 applies to the natural class
of nasal consonants, namely sounds that are [+nasal], [+consonantal].
The various classes of sounds discussed in chapter 4 also define natural classes
to which the phonological rules of all languages may refer. They also can be
specified by + and – feature values. Table 5.3 illustrates how these feature values
combine to define some major classes of phonemes. The presence of +/– indicates
that the sound may or may not possess a feature depending on its context. For
example, word-initial nasals are [–syllabic] but some word-final nasals can be
[+syllabic], as in button [bʌtn̩ ].
TABLE 5.3 | Feature Specification of Major Natural Classes of Sounds
Features
Consonantal
Sonorant
Syllabic
Nasal
Obstruents
Nasals
Liquids
Glides
Vowels
+
–
–
–
+
+
+/–
+
+
+
+/–
–
–
+
–
–
–
+
+
+/–
Feature Specifications for American English
Consonants and Vowels
Here are feature matrices for vowels and consonants in English. By selecting all
segments marked the same for one or more features, you can identify natural
classes. For example, the natural class of high vowels /i, ɪ, u, ʊ/ is marked [+high]
in the vowel feature chart of Table 5.4; the natural class of voiced stops /b, m, d,
n, g, ŋ, dʒ/ are the ones marked [+voice] [–continuant] in the consonant chart of
Table 5.5.
243
244
CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
TABLE 5.4 | Features of Some American English Vowels
Features
i
i
e
ɛ
æ
u
ʊ
o
ↄ
a
ʌ
High
Mid
Low
Back
Central
Round
Tense
+
–
–
–
–
–
+
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
–
–
+
–
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
+
–
+
+
+
–
–
+
–
+
–
–
+
–
+
–
+
+
–
+
–
+
–
+
–
–
–
+
+
–
–
+
–
+
–
–
+
–
–
The Rules of Phonology
But that to come
Shall all be done by the rule.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Antony and Cleopatra, 1623
Throughout this chapter we have emphasized that the relationship between the
phonemic representation of a word and its phonetic representation, or how it is
pronounced, is rule-governed. Phonological rules are part of a speaker’s knowledge of the language.
The phonemic representations are minimally specified because some features
or feature values are predictable. For example, in English all nasal consonants
are voiced, so we don’t need to specify voicing in the phonemic feature matrix for
nasals. Similarly, we don’t need to specify the feature round for non–low back
vowels. If Table 5.5 was strictly phonemic, then instead of a + in the voice-row
for m, n, and ŋ, the cells would be left blank, as would the cells in the round-row
of Table 5.4 for u, ʊ, o, ɔ. Such underspecification reflects the redundancy in the
phonology, which is also part of a speaker’s knowledge of the sound system. The
phonemic representation should include only the nonpredictable, distinctive features of the phonemes in a word. The phonetic representation, derived by applying
the phonological rules, includes all of the linguistically relevant phonetic aspects
of the sounds. It does not include all of the physical properties of the sounds of
an utterance, however, because the physical signal may vary in many ways that
have little to do with the phonological system. The absolute pitch of the sound,
the rate of speech, or its loudness is not linguistically significant. The phonetic
transcription is therefore also an abstraction from the physical signal; it includes
the nonvariant phonetic aspects of the utterances, those features that remain relatively constant from speaker to speaker and from one time to another.
Although the specific rules of phonology differ from language to language, the
kinds of rules, what they do, and the natural classes they refer to are universal.
Assimilation Rules
We have seen that nasalization of vowels in English is nonphonemic because it is
predictable by rule. The vowel nasalization rule is an assimilation rule, or a rule
+
–
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
+
–
–
–
Consonantal
Sonorant
Syllabic
Nasal
Voiced
Continuant
Labial
Alveolar
Palatal
Anterior
Velar
Coronal
Sibilant
+
–
–
–
+
–
+
–
–
+
–
–
–
b
+
+
–/+
+
+
–
+
–
–
+
–
–
–
m
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
+
–
+
–
+
–
t
+
–
–
–
+
–
–
+
–
+
–
+
–
d
+
+
–/+
+
+
–
–
+
–
+
–
+
–
n
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
k
+
–
–
–
+
–
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
g
+
+
–/+
+
+
–
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
ŋ
+
–
–
–
–
+
+
–
–
+
–
–
–
f
+
–
–
–
+
+
+
–
–
+
–
–
–
v
+
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
–
+
–
+
–
θ
+
–
–
–
+
+
–
–
–
+
–
+
–
ð
+
–
–
–
–
+
–
+
–
+
–
+
+
s
+
–
–
–
+
+
–
+
–
+
–
+
+
z
+
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
+
–
–
+
+
∫
+
–
–
–
+
+
–
–
+
–
–
+
+
ʒ
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
+
+
t∫
+
–
–
–
+
–
–
–
+
–
–
+
+
dʒ
Note: The phonemes /r/ and /l/ are distinguished by the feature [lateral], not shown here. /l/ is the only phoneme that would be [+lateral].
p
Features
TABLE 5.5 | Features of Some American English Consonants
r
+
+
+
+
–/+ –/+
–
–
+
+
+
+
–
–
+
+
–
–
+
+
–
–
+
+
–
–
l
–
+
–
–
+
+
–
–
+
–
–
+
–
j
–
+
–
–
+
+
+
–
–
–
+
–
–
w
–
+
–
–
–
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
h
The Rules of Phonology
245
246
CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
that makes neighboring segments more similar by duplicating a phonetic property.
For the most part, assimilation rules stem from articulatory processes. There is a
tendency when we speak to increase the ease of articulation. It is easier to lower
the velum while a vowel is being pronounced before a nasal stop than to wait for
the completion of the vowel and then require the velum to move suddenly.
We now wish to look more closely at the phonological rules we have been
discussing. Previously, we stated the vowel nasalization rule:
Vowels are nasalized before a nasal consonant within the same syllable.
This rule specifies the class of sounds affected by the rule:
Vowels
It states what phonetic change will occur by applying the rule:
Change phonemic oral vowels to phonetic nasal vowels.
And it specifies the context or phonological environment.
Before a nasal consonant within the same syllable.
A shorthand notation to write rules, similar to the way scientists and mathematicians use symbols, makes the rule statements more concise. Every physicist
knows that E = mc 2 means “Energy equals mass times the square of the velocity
of light.” We can use similar notations to state the nasalization rule as:
V → [+nasal] / __ [+nasal] $
Let’s look at the rule piece by piece.
V
Vowels
→
become
[+nasal]
nasalized
/
__
[+nasal]
in the
before
nasal
environment
segments
$
within a
syllable
To the left of the arrow is the class of sounds that is affected. To the right of the
arrow is the phonetic change that occurs. The phonological environment follows
the slash. The underscore __ is the relative position of the sound to be changed
within the environment, in this case before a nasal segment. The dollar sign
denotes a syllable boundary and guarantees that the environment does not cross
over to the next syllable.
This rule tells us that the vowels in such words as den /dɛn/ will become nasalized to [dɛ̃n], but deck /dɛk/ will not be affected and is pronounced [dɛk] because
/k/ is not a nasal consonant. As well, a word such as den$tal /dɛn$təl/ will be
pronounced [dɛ̃n$təl], where we have showed the syllable boundary explicitly.
However, the first vowel in de$note, /di$not/, will not be nasalized, because the
nasal segment does not precede the syllable boundary, so the “within a syllable”
condition is not met.
Any rule written in formal notation can be stated in words. The use of formal
notation is a shorthand way of presenting the information. Notation also reveals
the function of the rule more explicitly than words. It is easy to see in the for-
The Rules of Phonology
mal statement of the rule that this is an assimilation rule because the change to
[+nasal] occurs before [+nasal] segments. Assimilation rules in languages reflect
coarticulation—the spreading of phonetic features either in the anticipation or
in the perseveration (the “hanging on”) of articulatory processes. The auditory
effect is that words sound smoother.
The following example illustrates how the English vowel nasalization rule
applies. It also shows the assimilatory nature of the rule, that is, the change from
no nasal feature to [+nasal]:
“bob”
Phonemic representation
Nasality: phonemic feature value
Apply nasal rule
Nasality: phonetic feature value
Phonetic representation
/b
–
–
[b
a
0*
NA
–
a
“boom”
b/
–
/b
–
–
b]
–
[b
u
0
↓
+
ũ
m/
+
+
m]
*The 0 means not present on the phonemic level.
There are many assimilation rules in English and other languages. Recall that
the voiced /z/ of the English regular plural suffix is changed to [s] after a voiceless sound, and that similarly the voiced /d/ of the English regular past-tense
suffix is changed to [t] after a voiceless sound. These are instances of voicing
assimilation. In these cases the value of the voicing feature goes from [+voice] to
[–voice] because of assimilation to the [–voice] feature of the final consonant of
the stem, as in the derivation of cats:
/kæt + z/ → [kæts]
We saw a different kind of assimilation rule in Akan, where we observed
that the nasal negative morpheme was expressed as [m] before /p/, [n] before /t/,
and [ŋ] before /k/. (This is the homorganic nasal rule.) In this case the place of
articulation—bilabial, alveolar, velar—of the nasal assimilates to the place of
articulation of the following consonant. The same process occurs in English,
where the negative morpheme prefix spelled in- or im- agrees in place of articulation with the word to which it is prefixed, so we have impossible [ĩmpʰasəbəl],
intolerant [ĩntʰalərə̃nt], and incongruous [ĩŋkʰãngruəs]. In effect, the rule makes
two consonants that appear next to each other more similar.
ASL and other signed languages also have assimilation rules. One example
is handshape assimilation, which takes place in compounds such as the sign for
“blood.” This ASL sign is a compound of the signs for “red” and “flow.” The
handshape for “red” alone is formed at the chin by a closed hand with the index
finger pointed up. In the compound “blood” this handshape is replaced by that
of the following word “flow,” which is an open handshape (all fingers extended).
In other words, the handshape for “red” has undergone assimilation. The location of the sign (at the chin) remains the same. Examples such as this tell us
that while the features of signed languages are different from those of spoken
languages, their phonologies are organized according to principles like those of
spoken languages.
247
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
Dissimilation Rules
“Dennis the Menace” © Hank Ketcham. Reprinted with permission of North America Syndicate.
It is understandable that so many languages have assimilation rules; they permit
greater ease of articulation. It might seem strange, then, to learn that languages
also have dissimilation rules, in which a segment becomes less similar to another
segment. Ironically, such rules have the same explanation: it is sometimes easier
to articulate dissimilar sounds. The difficulty of tongue twisters like “the sixth
sheik’s sixth sheep is sick” is based on the repeated similarity of sounds. If one
The Rules of Phonology
were to make some sounds less similar, as in “the second sheik’s tenth sheep is
sick,” it would be easier to say. The cartoon makes the same point, with toy boat
being more difficult to articulate repeatedly than sail boat, because the [ɔɪ] of
toy is more similar to [o] than is the [e] of sail.
An example of easing pronunciation through dissimilation is found in some
varieties of English, where there is a fricative dissimilation rule. This rule applies
to sequences /fθ/ and /sθ/, changing them to [ft] and [st]. Here the fricative /θ/
becomes dissimilar to the preceding fricative by becoming a stop. For example,
the words fifth and sixth come to be pronounced as if they were spelled fift and
sikst.
A classic example of the same kind of dissimilation occurred in Latin, and the
results of this process show up in the derivational morpheme /-ar/ in English. In
Latin a derivational suffix -alis was added to nouns to form adjectives. When the
suffix was added to a noun that contained the liquid /l/, the suffix was changed
to -aris; that is, the liquid /l/ was changed to the dissimilar liquid /r/. These
words came into English as adjectives ending in -al or in its dissimilated form
-ar, as shown in the following examples:
-al
-ar
anecdot-al
annu-al
ment-al
pen-al
spiritu-al
ven-al
angul-ar
annul-ar
column-ar
perpendicul-ar
simil-ar
vel-ar
All of the -ar adjectives contain an /l/, and as columnar illustrates, the /l/ need
not be the consonant directly preceding the dissimilated segment.
Though dissimilation rules are rarer than assimilation rules, they are nevertheless found throughout the world’s languages.
Feature-Changing Rules
The assimilation and dissimilation rules we have seen may all be thought of
as feature-changing rules. In some cases a feature already present is changed.
The /z/ plural morpheme has its voicing value changed from plus to minus when
it follows a voiceless sound. Similarly, the /n/ in the phonemic negative prefix
morpheme /ɪn/ undergoes a change in its place of articulation feature when preceding bilabials or velars. In the case of the Latin dissimilation rule, the feature
[+lateral] is changed to [–lateral], so that /l/ is pronounced [r].
The addition of a feature is the other way in which we have seen features
change. The English vowel nasalization rule is a case in point. Phonemically,
vowels are not marked for nasality; however, in the environment specified by the
rule, the feature [+nasal] is added.
Some feature-changing rules are neither assimilation nor dissimilation rules.
The rule in English that aspirates voiceless stops at the beginning of a syllable
simply adds a nondistinctive feature. Generally, aspiration occurs only if the following vowel is stressed. The /p/ in pit and repeat is an aspirated [pʰ], but the
/p/ in inspect or compass is an unaspirated [p]. We also note that even with an
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intervening consonant, the aspiration takes place so that words such as crib,
clip, and quip ([kʰrɪb], [kʰlɪp], and [kʰwɪp]) all begin with an aspirated [kʰ]. And
finally, the affricate /tʃ/ is subject to the rule, so chip is phonetically [tʃʰɪp]. We
can now state the rule:
A voiceless, noncontinuant has [+aspirated] added to its feature matrix at
the beginning of a syllable containing a stressed vowel with an optional
intervening consonant.
Aspiration is not specified in any phonemic feature matrices of English. The
aspiration rule adds this feature for reasons having to do with the timing of the
closure release rather than in an attempt to make segments more alike or not
alike, as with assimilation and dissimilation rules.
Remember that /p/ and /b/ (and all such symbols) are simply cover symbols
that do not reveal the phonemic distinctions. In phonemic and phonetic feature
matrices, these differences are made explicit, as shown in the following phonemic matrices:
Consonantal
Continuant
Labial
Voiced
p
b
+
–
+
–
+
–
+
+
← distinctive difference
The nondistinctive feature “aspiration” is not included in these phonemic representations because aspiration is predictable.
Segment Insertion and Deletion Rules
Phonological rules may add or delete entire segments. These are different from
the feature-changing and feature-adding rules we have seen so far, which affect
only parts of segments. The process of inserting a consonant or vowel is called
epenthesis.
The rules for forming regular plurals, possessive forms, and third-person singular verb agreement in English all require an epenthesis rule. Here is the first
part of that rule that we gave earlier for plural formation:
Insert a [ə] before the plural morpheme /z/ when a regular noun ends in a
sibilant, giving [əz].
Letting the symbol ∅ stand for “null,” we can write this morphophonemic
epenthesis rule more formally as “null becomes schwa between two sibilants,”
or like this:
∅ → ə / [+sibilant] ___ [+sibilant]
Similarly, we recall the first part of the rule for regular past-tense formation in
English:
Insert a [ə] before the past-tense morpheme when a regular verb ends in a
non-nasal alveolar stop, giving [əd].
The Rules of Phonology
This epenthesis rule may also be expressed in our more formal notation:
∅ → ə / [– nasal, + alveolar, – continuant] ___ [– nasal, + alveolar,
– continuant]
There is a plausible explanation for insertion of a [ə]. If we merely added a
[z] to squeeze to form its plural, we would get [skwizː], which would be hard
for English speakers to distinguish from [skwiz]. Similarly, if we added just [d]
to load to form its past tense, it would be [lodː], which would also be difficult
to distinguish from [lod], because in English we do not contrast long and short
consonants. These and other examples suggest that the morphological patterns
in a language are closely related to other generalizations about the phonology of
that language.
Just as vowel length can be used for emphasis without changing the meaning
of a word, as in “Stooooop [staːp] hitting me,” an epenthetic schwa can have a
similar effect, as in “P-uh-lease [pʰəliz] let me go.”
Segment deletion rules are commonly found in many languages and are far
more prevalent than segment insertion rules. One such rule occurs in casual or
rapid speech. We often delete the unstressed vowels that are shown in bold type
in words like the following:
mystery general memory funeral vigorous Barbara
These words in casual speech sound as if they were written:
mystry genral memry funral vigrous Barbra
The silent g that torments spellers in such words as sign and design is actually
an indication of a deeper phonological process, in this case, one of segment deletion. Consider the following examples:
A
sign
design
paradigm
B
[sãɪn]
[dəzãɪn]
[pʰærədãɪm]
signature
designation
paradigmatic
[sɪgnətʃər]
[dεzɪgneʃə̃n]
[pʰærədɪgmæɾək]
In none of the words in column A is there a phonetic [g], but in each corresponding word in column B a [g] occurs. Our knowledge of English phonology
accounts for these phonetic differences. The “[g]—no [g]” alternation is regular,
and we apply it to words that we never have heard. Suppose someone says:
“He was a salignant [səlɪgnə̃nt] man.”
Not knowing what the word means (which you couldn’t, since we made it up),
you might ask:
“Why, did he salign [səlãɪn] somebody?”
It is highly doubtful that a speaker of English would pronounce the verb form
without the -ant as [səlɪgn], because the phonological rules of English would
delete the /g/ when it occurred in this context. This rule might be stated as:
Delete a /g/ when it occurs before a syllable-final nasal consonant.
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The rule is even more general, as evidenced by the pair gnostic [nastɪk] and
agnostic [ægnastɪk], and by the silent g’s in the cartoon:
“Tumbleweeds” © Tom K. Ryan. Reprinted with permission of North America Syndicate.
This more general rule may be stated as:
Delete a /g/ word initially before a nasal consonant or before a syllable-final
nasal consonant.
Given this rule, the phonemic representation of the stems in sign/signature,
design/ designation, malign/malignant, phlegm/phlegmatic, paradigm/paradigmatic, gnostic/agnostic, and so on will include a /g/ that will be deleted by the
regular rule if a prefix or suffix is not added. By stating the class of sounds that
follow the /g/ (nasal consonants) rather than any specific nasal consonant, the
rule deletes the /g/ before both /m/ and /n/.
Movement (Metathesis) Rules
“Family Circus” © Bil Keane, Inc. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
The Rules of Phonology
Phonological rules may also reorder sequences of phonemes, in which case they
are called metathesis rules. For some speakers of English, the word ask is pronounced [æks], but the word asking is pronounced [æsk ĩŋ]. In this case a metathesis rule reorders the /s/ and /k/ in certain contexts. In Old English the verb was
aksian, with the /k/ preceding the /s/. A historical metathesis rule switched these
two consonants, producing ask in most dialects of English. Children’s speech
shows many cases of metathesis (which are corrected as the child approaches
the adult grammar): aminal [æ̃mə̃nəl] for animal and pusketti [pʰəskɛti] for spaghetti are common children’s pronunciations. Dog lovers have metathesized the
Shetland sheepdog into a sheltie, and at least two presidents of the United States
have applied a metathesis rule to the word nuclear, which many Americans pronounce [njukliər], but is pronounced [nukjələr] by those leading statesmen.
From One to Many and from Many to One
As we’ve seen, phonological rules that relate phonemic to phonetic representations have several functions, among which are the following:
Function
Example
1. Change feature values
Nasal consonant assimilation rules in Akan
and English
Aspiration in English
g-deletion before nasals in English
Schwa insertion in English plural and past
tense
Metathesis rule relating [æsk] and [æks]
2. Add new features
3. Delete segments
4. Add segments
5. Reorder segments
The relationship between the phonemes and phones of a language is complex
and varied. Rarely is a single phoneme realized as one and only one phone.
We often find one phoneme realized as several phones, as in the case with
English voiceless stops that may be realized as aspirated or unaspirated, among
other possibilities. And we find the same phone may be the realization of
several different phonemes. Here is a dramatic example of that many-to-one
relationship.
Consider the vowels in the following pairs of words:
A
/i/
/ɪ/
/e/
/ɛ/
/æ/
/a/
/o/
/ʊ/
compete
medicinal
maintain
telegraph
analysis
solid
phone
Talmudic
B
[i]
[ɪ]
[e]
[ɛ]
[æ]
[a]
[o]
[ʊ]
competition
medicine
maintenance
telegraphy
analytic
solidity
phonetic
Talmud
[ə]
[ə]
[ə]
[ə]
[ə]
[ə]
[ə]
[ə]
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In column A all the boldfaced vowels are stressed vowels with a variety of
vowel phones; in column B the boldfaced vowels are without stress or reduced
and are pronounced as schwa [ə]. In these cases the stress pattern of the word
varies because of the different suffixes. The vowel that is stressed in one form
becomes reduced in a different form and is therefore pronounced as [ə]. The
phonemic representations of all of the root morphemes contain an unreduced
vowel such as /i/ or /e/ that is phonetically [ə] when it is reduced. We can conclude, then, that [ə] is an allophone of all English vowel phonemes. The rule to
derive the schwa is simple to state:
Change a vowel to a [ə] when the vowel is reduced.
In the phonological description of a language, it is not always straightforward to determine phonemic representations from phonetic transcriptions. How
would we deduce the /o/ in phonetic from its pronunciation as [fə̃nεɾɪk] without
a complete phonological analysis? However, given the phonemic representation
and the phonological rules, we can always derive the correct phonetic representation. In our internal mental grammars this derivation is no problem, because
the words occur in their phonemic forms in our mental lexicons and we know
the rules of the language.
Similar rules exist in other languages that show that there is no one-to-one
relationship between phonemes and phones. For example, in German both
voiced and voiceless obstruents occur as phonemes, as is shown by the following
minimal pair:
Tier [tiːr] “animal”
dir [diːr] “to you”
However, when voiced obstruents occur at the end of a word or syllable, they
become voiceless. The words meaning “bundle” Bund /bʊnd/ and “colorful”
bunt /bʊnt/ are phonetically identical and pronounced [bʊnt] with a final [t].
Obstruent voicing is neutralized in syllable-final position.
The German devoicing rule changes the specifications of features. In German, the phonemic representation of the final stop in Bund is /d/, specified as
[+voiced]; it is changed by rule to [–voiced] to derive the phonetic [t] in wordfinal position. Again, this shows there is no simple relationship between phonemes and their allophones. German presents us with this picture:
German Phonemes
/d/
/t/
German Phones
[d]
[t]
The devoicing rule in German provides a further illustration that we cannot
discern the phonemic representation of a word given only the phonetic form;
[bʊnt] can be derived from either /bʊnd/ or /bʊnt/. The phonemic representations
and the phonological rules together determine the phonetic forms.
The Rules of Phonology
The Function of Phonological Rules
The function of the phonological rules in a grammar is to provide the phonetic
information necessary for the pronunciation of utterances. We may illustrate
this point in the following way:
input
Phonemic (Mental Lexicon) Representation of Words
in a Sentence
Phonological rules (P-rules)
output
Phonetic Representation of Words in a Sentence
The input to the P-rules is the phonemic representation. The P-rules apply to
the phonemic strings and produce as output the phonetic representation.
The application of rules in this way is called a derivation. We have given
examples of derivations that show how plurals are derived, how phonemically
oral vowels become nasalized, and how /t/ and /d/ become flaps in certain environments. A derivation is thus an explicit way of showing both the effects and
the function of phonological rules in a grammar.
All the examples of derivations we have so far considered show the application of just one phonological rule, except the plural and past-tense rules, which
are actually one rule with two parts. In any event, it is common for more than
one rule to apply to a word. For example, the word tempest is phonemically
/tɛmpɛst/ (as shown by the pronunciation of tempestuous [tʰɛ̃mpʰɛstʃuəs]) but
phonetically [tʰɛ̃mpəst]. Three rules apply to it: the aspiration rule, the vowel
nasalization rule, and the schwa rule. We can derive the phonetic form from the
phonemic representation as follows:
Underlying phonemic representation
/ t
” m p
s t /
th
Aspiration rule
”)
Nasalization rule
E
Schwa rule
Surface phonetic representation
”
[ tÓ
”) m p
E
s t ]
Slips of the Tongue: Evidence
for Phonological Rules
Slips of the tongue, or speech errors, in which we deviate in some way from
the intended utterance, show phonological rules in action. We all make speech
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errors, and they tell us interesting things about language and its use. Consider
the following speech errors:
Intended Utterance
Actual Utterance
1. gone to seed
[gãn tə sid]
2. stick in the mud
[stɪk ĩn ðə mʌd]
3. speech production
[spitʃ pʰrədʌkʃə̃n]
god to seen
[gad tə sĩn]
smuck in the tid
[smʌk ĩn ðə tʰɪd]
preach seduction
[pʰritʃ sədʌkʃə̃n]
In the first example, the final consonants of the first and third words were
reversed. Notice that the reversal of the consonants also changed the nasality
of the vowels. The vowel [ã] in the intended utterance is replaced by [a]. In the
actual utterance, the nasalization was lost because it no longer occurred before a
nasal consonant. The vowel in the third word, which was the non-nasal [i] in the
intended utterance, became [ĩ] in the error, because it was followed by /n/. The
nasalization rule applied.
In the other two errors, we see the application of the aspiration rule. In the
intended stick, the /t/ would have been realized as an unaspirated [t] because
it follows the syllable initial /s/. When it was switched with the /m/ in mud, it
was pronounced as the aspirated [tʰ], because it occurred initially. The third
example also illustrates the aspiration rule in action. More than being simply
amusing, speech errors are linguistically interesting because they provide further
evidence for phonological rules and for the decomposition of speech sounds into
features.
We will learn more about speech errors in chapter 8 on language processing.
Prosodic Phonology
Syllable Structure
Baby Blues © Baby Blues Partnership. King Features Syndicate
Prosodic Phonology
Words are composed of one or more syllables. A syllable is a phonological unit
composed of one or more phonemes. Every syllable has a nucleus, which is usually a vowel (but which may be a syllabic liquid or nasal). The nucleus may be
preceded and/or followed by one or more phonemes called the syllable onset and
coda. From a very early age, children learn that certain words rhyme. In rhyming words, the nucleus and the coda of the final syllable of both words are identical, as in the following jingle:
Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down
And broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
For this reason, the nucleus + coda constitute the subsyllabic unit called a
rime (note the spelling).
A syllable thus has a hierarchical structure. Using the IPA symbol σ for the
phonological syllable, the hierarchical structure of the monosyllabic word splints
can be shown:
Í
Onset
Rime
Nucleus
s
p
l
I
Coda
n
t
s
Word Stress
In many languages, including English, one or more of the syllables in every
content word (i.e., every word except for function words like to, the, a, of) are
stressed. A stressed syllable, which can be marked by an acute accent (´), is perceived as more prominent than an unstressed syllable, as shown in the following
examples:
pérvert
pervért
súbject
subjéct
(noun)
(verb)
(noun)
(verb)
as in
as in
as in
as in
“My neighbor is a pervert.”
“Don’t pervert the idea.”
“Let’s change the subject.”
“He’ll subject us to criticism.”
These pairs show that stress can be contrastive in English. In these cases it
distinguishes between nouns and verbs.
Some words may contain more than one stressed vowel, but exactly one of
the stressed vowels is more prominent than the others. The vowel that receives
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primary stress is marked by an acute accent. The other stressed vowels are
indicated by a grave accent (` )̀ over the vowels (these vowels receive secondary
stress).
rèsignátion
fùndaméntal
lìnguístics
ìntrodúctory
sỳstəmátic
rèvolútion
Generally, speakers of a language know which syllable receives primary
stress, which ones receive secondary stress, and which ones are reduced (are
unstressed). It is part of their implicit knowledge of the language. It’s usually
easy to distinguish between stressed and reduced syllables, because the vowel
in reduced syllables is pronounced as a schwa [ə], except at the ends of certain
words such as confetti or laboratory. It may be harder to distinguish between
primary and secondary stress. If you are unsure of where the primary stress is in
a word (and you are a native or near-native speaker of English), try shouting the
word as if talking to a person across a busy street. Often, the difference in stress
becomes more apparent.
The stress pattern of a word may differ among English-speaking people. For
example, in most varieties of American English the word láboratòry [lǽbərətʰɔ̀ri]
has two stressed syllables, but in most varieties of British English it receives
only one stress [ləbɔ́rətri]. Because English vowels generally reduce to schwa or
delete when they are not stressed, the British and American vowels differ in this
word. In fact, in the British version the fourth vowel is deleted because it is not
stressed.
Stress is a property of the syllable rather than a segment; it is a prosodic
or suprasegmental feature. To produce a stressed syllable, one may change the
pitch (usually by raising it), make the syllable louder, or make it longer. We often
use all three of these phonetic means to stress a syllable.
Sentence and Phrase Stress
“Bimbo’s Circus” © Howie Schneider/Dist. by Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc.
When words are combined into phrases and sentences, one syllable receives
greater stress than all others. That is, just as there is only one primary stress
Prosodic Phonology
in a word spoken in isolation, only one of the vowels in a phrase (or sentence)
receives primary stress or accent. All of the other stressed vowels are reduced to
secondary stress. In English we place primary stress on the adjectival part of a
compound noun (which may be written as one word, two words separated by a
hyphen, or two separate words), but we place the stress on the noun when the
words are a noun phrase consisting of an adjective followed by a noun. The differences between the following pairs are therefore predictable:
Compound Noun
Adjective + Noun
tíghtrope (“a rope for acrobatics”)
Rédcoat (“a British soldier”)
hótdog (“a frankfurter”)
Whíte House (“the President’s house”)
tight rópe (“a rope drawn taut”)
red cóat (“a coat that is red”)
hot dóg (“an overheated dog”)
white hóuse (“a house painted
white”)
Say these examples out loud, speaking naturally, and at the same time listen
or feel the stress pattern. If English is not your native language, listen to a native
speaker say them.
These pairs show that stress may be predictable from the morphology and
syntax. The phonology interacts with the other components of the grammar.
The stress differences between the noun and verb pairs discussed in the previous
section (subject as noun or verb) are also predictable from the syntactic word
category.
Intonation
“What can I do, Tertius?” said Rosamond, turning her eyes on him again. That little speech
of four words, like so many others in all languages, is capable by varied vocal inflexions
of expressing all states of mind from helpless dimness to exhaustive argumentative
perception, from the completest self-devoting fellowship to the most neutral aloofness.
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch, 1872
In chapter 4, we discussed pitch as a phonetic feature in reference to tone languages and intonation languages. In this chapter we have discussed the use of
phonetic features to distinguish meaning. We can now see that pitch is a phonemic feature in tone languages such as Chinese, Thai, and Akan. We refer to these
relative pitches as contrasting tones. In intonation languages such as English,
pitch still plays an important role, but in the form of the pitch contour or intonation of the phrase or sentence.
In English, intonation may reflect syntactic or semantic differences. If we say
John is going with a falling pitch at the end, it is a statement, but if the pitch
rises at the end, it may be interpreted as a question. Similarly, What’s in the tea,
honey? may, depending on intonation, be a query to someone called “honey”
regarding the contents of the tea (falling intonation on honey), or may be a query
regarding whether the tea contains honey (rising intonation on honey).
A sentence that is ambiguous in writing may be unambiguous when spoken
because of differences in the pitch contour, as we saw in the previous paragraph.
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Here is a somewhat more subtle example. Written, sentence 1 is unclear as to
whether Tristram intended for Isolde to read and follow directions, or merely to
follow him:
1.
Tristram left directions for Isolde to follow.
Spoken, if Tristram wanted Isolde to follow him, the sentence would be pronounced with a rise in pitch on the first syllable of follow, followed by a fall in
pitch, as indicated (oversimplistically) in sentence 2.
Tristram left directions for Isolde to follow.
In this pronunciation of the sentence, the primary stress is on the word follow.
If the meaning is to read and follow a set of directions, the highest pitch
comes on the second syllable of directions, as illustrated, again oversimplistically, in sentence 3.
Tristram left directions for Isolde to follow.
The primary stress in this pronunciation is on the word directions.
Pitch plays an important role in both tone languages and intonation languages, but in different ways, depending on the phonological system of the
respective languages.
Sequential Constraints of Phonemes
If you were to receive the following telegram, you would have no difficulty in correcting
the “obvious” mistakes:
BEST WISHES FOR VERY HAPPP BIRTFDAY
because sequences such as BIRTFDAY do not occur in the language.
COLIN CHERRY, On Human Communication, 1957
Suppose you were given the following four phonemes and asked to arrange them
to form all possible English words:
/b/
/ɪ/
/k/
/l/
You would most likely produce the following:
/blɪk/
/klɪb/
/bɪlk/
/kɪlb/
These are the only permissible arrangements of these phonemes in English.
*/lbkɪ/, */ɪlbk/, */bkɪl/, and */ɪlkb/ are not possible English words. Although /blɪk/
and /klɪb/ are not now existing words, if you heard someone say:
“I just bought a beautiful new blick.”
Sequential Constraints of Phonemes
you might ask: “What’s a blick?”
If, on the other hand, you heard someone say:
“I just bought a beautiful new bkli.”
you might reply, “You just bought a new what?”
Your knowledge of English phonology includes information about what
sequences of phonemes are permissible, and what sequences are not. After a consonant like /b/, /g/, /k/, or /p/, another stop consonant in the same syllable is not
permitted by the phonology. If a word begins with an /l/ or an /r/, the next segment must be a vowel. That is why */lbɪk/ does not sound like an English word.
It violates the restrictions on the sequencing of phonemes. People who like to
work crossword puzzles are often more aware of these constraints than the ordinary speaker, whose knowledge, as we have emphasized, may not be conscious.
Other such constraints exist in English. If the initial sounds of chill or Jill
begin a word, the next sound must be a vowel. The words /tʃʌt/ or /tʃon/ or /tʃæk/
are possible in English (chut, chone, chack), as are /dʒæl/ or /dʒil/ or /dʒalɪk/
(jal, jeel, jolick), but */tʃlɔt/ and */dʒpurz/ are not. No more than three sequential
consonants can occur at the beginning of a word, and these three are restricted
to /s/ + /p,t,k/ + /l,r,w,y/. There are even restrictions if this condition is met.
For example, /stl/ is not a permitted sequence, so stlick is not a possible word in
English, but strick is, along with spew /spju/, sclaff /sklæf/ (to strike the ground
with a golf club), and squat /skwat/.
Other languages have different sequential restrictions. In Polish zl and kt are
permissible syllable-initial combinations, as in /zlev/, “a sink,” and /kto/, “who.”
Croatian permits words like the name Mladen. Japanese has severe constraints
on what may begin a syllable; most combinations of consonants (e.g., /br/, /sp/)
are impermissible.
The limitations on sequences of segments are called phonotactic constraints.
Phonotactic constraints have as their basis the syllable, rather than the word.
That is, only the clusters that can begin a syllable can begin a word, and only a
cluster that can end a syllable can end a word.
In multisyllabic words, clusters that seem illegal may occur, for example the
/kspl/ in explicit /ɛksplɪsɪt/. However, there is a syllable boundary between the
/ks/ and /pl/, which we can make explicit using $: /ɛk $ splɪs $ ɪt/. Thus we have a
permitted syllable coda /k/ that ends a syllable adjoined to a permitted onset /spl/
that begins a syllable. On the other hand, English speakers know that “condstluct” is not a possible word because the second syllable would have to start with
an impermissible onset, either /stl/ or /tl/.
In Twi, a word may end only in a vowel or a nasal consonant. The sequence
/pik/ is not a possible Twi word because it breaks the phonotactic rules of the
language, whereas /mba/ is not a possible word in English, although it is a word
in Twi.
All languages have constraints on the permitted sequences of phonemes,
although different languages have different constraints. Just as spoken language
has sequences of sounds that are not permitted in the language, so sign languages
have forbidden combinations of features. For example, in the ASL compound for
“blood” (red flow) discussed earlier, the total handshape must be assimilated,
including the shape of the hand and the orientation of the fingers. Assimilation
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of just the handshape but not the finger orientation is impossible in ASL. The
constraints may differ from one sign language to another, just as the constraints
on sounds and sound sequences differ from one spoken language to another.
A permissible sign in a Chinese sign language may not be a permissible sign in
ASL, and vice versa. Children learn these constraints when they acquire the spoken or signed language, just as they learn what the phonemes are and how they
are related to phonetic segments.
Lexical Gaps
The words bot [bat] and crake [kʰrek] are not known to all speakers of English,
but they are words. On the other hand [bʊt] (rhymes with put), creck [kʰrɛk],
cruke [kʰruk], cruk [kʰrʌk], and crike [kʰraɪk] are not now words in English,
although they are possible words.
Advertising professionals often use possible but nonoccurring words for the
names of new products. Although we would hardly expect a new product or
company to come on the market with the name Zhleet [ʒlit]—an impossible
word in English—we do not bat an eye at Bic, Xerox /ziraks/, Kodak, Glaxo, or
Spam (a meat product, not junk mail), because those once nonoccurring words
obey the phonotactic constraints of English.
A possible word contains phonemes in sequences that obey the phonotactic
constraints of the language. An actual, occurring word is the union of a possible
word with a meaning. Possible words without meaning are sometimes called
nonsense words and are also referred to as accidental gaps in the lexicon, or
lexical gaps. Thus “words” such as creck and cruck are nonsense words and
represent accidental gaps in the lexicon of English.
Why Do Phonological Rules Exist?
No rule is so general, which admits not some exception.
ROBERT BURTON, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621
A very important question that we have not addressed thus far is: Why do grammars have phonological rules at all? In other words, why don’t underlying or
phonemic forms surface intact rather than undergoing various changes?
In the previous section we discussed phonotactic constraints, which are
part of our knowledge of phonology. As we saw, phonotactic constraints specify which sound sequences are permissible in a particular language, so that in
English blick is a possible word but *lbick isn’t. Many linguists believe that phonological rules exist to ensure that the surface or phonetic forms of words do not
violate phonotactic constraints. If underlying forms remained unmodified, they
would often violate the phonotactics of the language.
Consider, for example, the English past-tense rule and recall that it has two
subrules. The first inserts a schwa when a regular verb ends in an alveolar stop
(/t/ or /d/), as in mated [metəd]. The second devoices the past-tense morpheme
/d/ when it occurs after a voiceless sound, as in reaped [ript] or peaked [pʰikt].
Why Do Phonological Rules Exist?
Notice that the part of the rule that devoices /d/ reflects the constraint that
English words may not end in a sequence consisting of a voiceless stop + d.
Words such as [lɪpd] and [mɪkd] do not exist, nor could they exist. They are
impossible words of English, just as [bkɪl] is.
More generally, there are no words that end in a sequence of obstruents whose
voicing features do not match. Thus words such as [kasb], where the final two
obstruents are [–voice] [+voice] are not possible, nor are words such as [kabs]
whose final two obstruents are [+voice] [–voice]. On the other hand, [kasp] and
[kɛbz] are judged to be possible words because the final two segments agree
in voicing. Thus, there appears to be a general constraint in English, stated as
follows:
(A) Obstruent sequences may not differ with respect to their voice feature at
the end of a word.
We can see then that the devoicing part of the past-tense rule changes the
underlying form of the past-tense morpheme to create a surface form that conforms to this general constraint.
Similarly, the schwa insertion part of the past-tense rule creates possible sound
sequences from impossible ones. English does not generally permit sequences of
sounds within a single syllable that are very similar to each other, such as [kk],
[kg], [gk], [gg], [pp], [sz], [zs], and so on. (The words spelled egg and puppy are
phonetically [ɛg] and [pʌpɪ].) Thus the schwa insertion rule separates sequences
of sounds that are otherwise not permitted in the language because they are too
similar to each other, for example, the sequence of /d/ and /d/ in /mɛnd + d/,
which becomes [mɛ̃ndəd] mended, or /t/ and /d/ in /part + d/, which becomes
[pʰartəd] parted. The relevant constraint is stated as follows:
(B) Sequences of obstruents that differ at most with respect to voicing are not
permitted within English words.
Constraints such as (A) and (B) are far more general than particular rules like
the past-tense rule. For example, constraint B might also explain why an adjective such as smooth turns into the abstract noun smoothness, rather than taking
the affix -th [θ], as in wide-width, broad-breadth, and deep-depth. Suffixing
smooth with -th would result in a sequence of too similar obstruents, smoo[ðθ],
which differ only in their voicing feature. This suggests that languages may satisfy constraints in various grammatical situations.
Thus, phonological rules exist because languages have general principles that
constrain possible sequences of sounds. The rules specify minimal modifications
of the underlying forms that bring them in line with the surface constraints.
Therefore, we find different variants of a particular underlying form depending
on the phonological context.
It has also been proposed that a universal set of phonological constraints
exists, and that this set is ordered, with some constraints being more highly
ranked than others. The higher the constraint is ranked, the more influence it
exerts on the language. This proposal, known as Optimality Theory, also holds
that the particular constraint rankings can differ from language to language,
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and that the different rankings generate the different sound patterns shown
across languages. For example, constraint B is highly ranked in English; and so
we have the English past-tense rule, as well as many other rules, including the
plural rule (with some modification), that modify sequences of sounds that are
too similar. Constraint B is also highly ranked in other languages, for example,
Modern Hebrew, in which suffixes that begin with /t/ are always separated from
stems ending in /t/ or /d/ by inserting [e], as in /kiʃat + ti/ → [kiʃatetɪ] meaning “I decorated.” In Berber, similar consonants such as tt, dd, ss, and so on
can surface at the end of words. In this language, constraint B is not highly
ranked; other constraints outrank it and therefore exert a stronger effect on
the language, notably constraints that require that surface forms not deviate
from corresponding underlying forms. These constraints, known as faithfulness
constraints, compete in the rankings with constraints that modify the underlying forms. Faithfulness constraints reflect the drive among languages to want a
morpheme to have a single identifiable form, a drive that is in competition with
constraints such as A and B. In the case of the English past-tense morpheme, the
drive toward a single morpheme shows up in the spelling, which is always -ed.
In our discussion of syntactic rules in chapter 2, we noted that there are principles of Universal Grammar (UG) operating in the syntax. Two examples of
this are the principle that transformational rules are structure dependent and the
constraint that movement rules may not move phrases out of coordinate structures. If Optimality Theory is correct, and universal phonological constraints
exist that differ among languages only in their rankings, then phonological
rules, like syntactic rules, are constrained by universal principles. The differences in constraint rankings across languages are in some ways parallel to the
different parameter settings that exist in the syntax of different languages, also
discussed in chapter 2. We noted that in acquiring the syntax of her language,
the young child must set the parameters of UG at the values that are correct for
the language of the environment. Similarly, in acquiring the phonology of her
language, the child must determine the correct constraint rankings as evidenced
in the input language. We will have more to say about language acquisition in
chapter 7.
Phonological Analysis
Out of clutter, find simplicity.
From discord, find harmony.
ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879–1955)
Children recognize phonemes at an early age without being taught, as we shall
see in chapter 7. Before reading this book, or learning anything about phonology, you knew a p sound was a phoneme in English because it contrasts words
like pat and cat, pat and sat, pat and mat. But you probably did not know that
the p in pat and the p in spit are different sounds. There is only one /p/ phoneme
in English, but that phoneme has more than one allophone, including an aspirated one and an unaspirated one.
Phonological Analysis
If a non-English-speaking linguist analyzed English, how could this fact about
the sound p be discovered? More generally, how do linguists discover the phonological system of a language?
To do a phonological analysis, the words to be analyzed must be transcribed
in great phonetic detail, because we do not know in advance which phonetic
features are distinctive and which are not.
Consider the following Finnish words:
1.
2.
3.
4.
[kudot]
[kate]
[katot]
[kade]
“failures”
“cover”
“roofs”
“envious”
5.
6.
7.
8.
[madon]
[maton]
[ratas]
[radon]
“of a worm”
“of a rug”
“wheel”
“of a track”
Given these words, do the voiceless/voiced alveolar stops [t] and [d] represent
different phonemes, or are they allophones of the same phone?
Here are a few hints as to how a phonologist might proceed:
1.
2.
3.
Check to see if there are any minimal pairs.
Items (2) and (4) are minimal pairs: [kate] “cover” and [kade] “envious.”
Items (5) and (6) are minimal pairs: [madon] “of a worm” and [maton] “of a
rug.”
[t] and [d] in Finnish thus represent the distinct phonemes /t/ and /d/.
That was an easy problem. Now consider the following data from English, again
focusing on [t] and [d] together with the alveolar flap [ɾ] and primary stress ´:
[ráɪt]
[déɾə]
[mǽd]
[bətróð]
[lǽɾər]
[ráɪɾər]
[déɾɪŋ]
[mʌ́ɾər]
[mǽɾər]
“write”
“data”
“mad”
“betroth”
“latter”
“rider”
“dating”
“mutter”
“madder”
[ráɪɾər]
[dét]
[mǽt]
[lǽɾər]
[dɪ ś tə̃ns]
[ráɪd]
[bɛ́dsaɪd]
[tú ɾər]
[mǽdnɪs]
“writer”
“date”
“mat”
“ladder”
“distance”
“ride”
“bedside”
“tutor”
“madness”
A broad examination of the data reveals minimal pairs involving [t] and [d], so
clearly /t/ and /d/ are phonemes. We also see some interesting homophones, such
as ladder and latter, and writer and rider. And the flap [ɾ]? Is it a phoneme? Or
is it predictable somehow? At this point the linguist undertakes the tedious task
of identifying all of the immediate environments for [t], [d], and [ɾ], using # for
a word boundary:
[t]: áɪ_#, é_#, ǽ_#, ə_r, s_ə, #_ú
[d]: #_é (3 times), ǽ_#, #_ɪ ,́ áɪ_#, ɛ́ _s, ǽ_n
[ɾ]: áɪ_ə (2 times), é_ə, ǽ_ə (3 times), é_ɪ, ú _ə, ʌ́_ə
It does not appear at this point that anything systematic is going on with vowel
or consonant quality, so we abstract the data a little, using v for an unstressed
vowel, v ́ for a stressed vowel, C for a consonant, and # for a word boundary:
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[t]: v́_#, #_v́,́ C_v, v_C
[d]: #_v́,́ v́_́ #, v́_́ C
[ɾ]: v́_́ v
Now we see clearly that [ɾ] is in complementary distribution with both [t] and [d].
It occurs only when preceded by a stressed vowel and followed by an unstressed
vowel, and neither [t] nor [d] ever do. We may conclude, based on these data,
that [ɾ] is an allophone of both /t/ and /d/. We tentatively propose the “alveolar
flap rule”ː
An alveolar stop becomes a flap in the environment between a stressed and
unstressed vowel.
The phonemic forms lack a flap, so that writer is phonemically /raɪtər/ and rider
is /raɪdər/, based on [raɪt] and [raɪd]. Similarly, we can propose /mædər/ for madder based on [mæd] and [mædnɪs], and /detɪŋ/ for dating based on [det]. But we
don’t have enough information to determine phonemic forms of data, latter,
ladder, tatter, and tutor. This is typically the case in actual analyses. Rarely is
there sufficient evidence to provide all the answers.
Finally, consider these data from Greek, focusing on the following sounds:
[x]
[k]
[c]
[ç]
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
voiceless velar fricative
voiceless velar stop
voiceless palatal stop
voiceless palatal fricative
[kano]
[xano]
[çino]
[cino]
[kali]
[xali]
[çeli]
[ceri]
“do”
“lose”
“pour”
“move”
“charms”
“plight”
“eel”
“candle”
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
[çeri]
[kori]
[xori]
[xrima]
[krima]
[xufta]
[kufeta]
[oçi]
“hand”
“daughter”
“dances”
“money”
“shame”
“handful”
“bonbons”
“no”
To determine the status of [x], [k], [c], and [ç], you should answer the following questions.
1.
2.
3.
4.
Are there are any minimal pairs in which these sounds contrast?
Are any noncontrastive sounds in complementary distribution?
If noncontrasting phones are found, what are the phonemes and their
allophones?
What are the phonological rules by which the allophones can be derived?
1. By analyzing the data, we find that [k] and [x] contrast in a number of
minimal pairs, for example, in [kano] and [xano]. [k] and [x] are therefore distinctive. [c] and [ç] also contrast in [çino] and [cino] and are therefore distinctive.
But what about the velar fricative [x] and the palatal fricative [ç]? And the velar
Phonological Analysis
stop [k] and the palatal stop [c]? We can find no minimal pairs that would conclusively show that these represent separate phonemes.
2. We now proceed to answer the second question: Are these noncontrasting
phones, namely [x]/[ç] and [k]/[c], in complementary distribution? One way to
see if sounds are in complementary distribution is to list each phone with the
environment in which it is found, as follows:
Phone
Environment
[k]
[x]
[c]
[ç]
before [a], [o], [u], [r]
before [a], [o], [u], [r]
before [i], [e]
before [i], [e]
We see that [k] and [x] are not in complementary distribution; they both occur
before back vowels. Nor are [c] and [ç] in complementary distribution. They
both occur before front vowels. But the stops [k] and [c] are in complementary
distribution; [k] occurs before back vowels and [r], and never occurs before front
vowels. Similarly, [c] occurs only before front vowels and never before back vowels or [r]. Finally, [x] and [ç] are in complementary distribution for the same reason. We therefore conclude that [k] and [c] are allophones of one phoneme, and
the fricatives [x] and [ç] are also allophones of one phoneme. The pairs of allophones also fulfill the criterion of phonetic similarity. The first two are [–anterior] stops; the second are [–anterior] fricatives. (This similarity discourages us
from pairing [k] with [ç], and [c] with [x], which are less similar to each other.)
3. Which of the phone pairs are more basic, and hence the ones whose features would define the phoneme? When two allophones can be derived from one
phoneme, one selects as the underlying segment the allophone that makes the
rules and the phonemic feature matrix as simple as possible, as we illustrated
with the English unaspirated and aspirated voiceless stops.
In the case of the velar and palatal stops and fricatives in Greek, the rules
appear to be equally simple. However, in addition to the simplicity criterion,
we wish to state rules that have natural phonetic explanations. Often these turn
out to be the simplest solution. In many languages, velar sounds become palatal
before front vowels. This is an assimilation rule; palatal sounds are produced
toward the front of the mouth, as are front vowels. Thus we select /k/ as a phoneme with the allophones [k] and [c], and /x/ as a phoneme with the allophones
[x] and [ç].
4. We can now state the rule by which the palatals can be derived from the
velars.
Palatalize velar consonants before front vowels.
Using feature notation we can state the rule as:
[+velar] → [+palatal] / ____ [–back]
Because only consonants are marked for the feature [velar], and only vowels
for the feature [back], it is not necessary to include the features [consonantal]
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
or [syllabic] in the rule. We also do not need to include any other features that
are redundant in defining the segments to which the rule applies or the environment in which the rule applies. Thus [+palatal] in the change part of the rule is
sufficient, and the feature [–back] also suffices to specify the front vowels. The
simplicity criterion constrains us to state the rule as simply as we can.
Summary
Part of one’s knowledge of a language is knowledge of the phonology or sound
system of that language. It includes the inventory of phones—which are the phonetic sounds that occur in the language—and the ways in which they pattern.
This patterning determines the inventory of phonemes—the abstract basic units
that differentiate words.
When similar phones occur in complementary distribution, they are allophones—predictable phonetic variants—of one phoneme. Thus the aspirated [pʰ]
and the unaspirated [p] are allophones of the phoneme /p/ because they occur in
different phonetic environments.
Some phones may be allophones of more than one phoneme. There is no
one-to-one correspondence between the phonemes of a language and their allophones. In English, for example, stressed vowels become unstressed according to
regular rules, and ultimately reduce to schwa [ə], which is an allophone of each
English vowel.
Phonological segments—phonemes and phones—are composed of phonetic
features such as voiced, nasal, labial, and continuant, whose presence or absence
is indicated by + or – signs. Voiced, continuant, and many others are distinctive
features—they can contrast words. Other features like aspiration are nondistinctive and are predictable from phonetic context. Some features like nasal may
be distinctive for one class of sounds (e.g., consonants) but nondistinctive for a
different class of sounds (e.g., vowels). Phonetic features that are nondistinctive
in one language may be distinctive in another. Aspiration is distinctive in Thai
and nondistinctive in English.
When two distinct words are distinguished by a single phone occurring in the
same position, they constitute a minimal pair, e.g., fine [faɪn] and vine [vaɪn].
Minimal pairs also occur in sign languages. Signs may contrast by handshape,
location, and movement.
Words in some languages may also be phonemically distinguished by prosodic or suprasegmental features, such as pitch, stress, and segment length. Languages in which syllables or words are contrasted by pitch are called tone languages. Intonation languages may use pitch variations to distinguish meanings
of phrases and sentences.
The relationship between phonemic representation and phonetic representation (pronunciation) is determined by phonological rules. Phonological rules
apply to phonemic strings and alter them in various ways to derive their phonetic
pronunciation, or in the case of signed languages, their hand configuration. They
may be assimilation rules, dissimilation rules, rules that add nondistinctive features, epenthetic rules that insert segments, deletion rules, and metathesis rules
that reorder segments.
References for Further Reading
Phonological rules generally refer to entire classes of sound. These are natural
classes, characterized by a small set of phonetic features shared by all the members of the class, e.g., [–continuant], [–voiced], to designate the natural class of
voiceless stops.
Linguists may use a mathematical-like formulation to express phonological
rules in a concise way. For example, the rule that nasalizes vowels when they
occur before a nasal consonant may be written V → [+nasal] / __ [+nasal].
Morphophonemic rules apply to specific morphemes, e.g., the plural morpheme /z/ is phonetically [z], [s], or [əz], depending on the final phoneme of the
noun to which it is attached.
The phonology of a language also includes sequential constraints (phonotactics) that determine which sounds may be adjacent within the syllable. These
determine what words are possible in a language, and what phonetic strings are
impermissible. Possible but nonoccurring words constitute accidental gaps and
are nonsense words, e.g., blick [blɪk].
Phonological rules exist in part to enforce phonotactic constraints. Optimality Theory hypothesizes a set of ranked constraints that govern the phonological
rules.
To discover the phonemes of a language, linguists (or students of linguistics)
can use a methodology such as looking for minimal pairs of words, or for sounds
that are in complementary distribution.
The phonological rules in a language show that the phonemic shape of words
is not identical with their phonetic form. The phonemes are not the actual phonetic sounds, but are abstract mental constructs that are realized as sounds by
the operation of rules such as those described in this chapter. No one is taught
these rules, yet everyone knows them subconsciously.
References for Further Reading
Anderson, S. R. 1985. Phonology in the twentieth century: Theories of rules and theories of representations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bybee, J. 2002. Phonology and language use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Chomsky, N., and M. Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper &
Row.
Clements, G. N., and S. J. Keyser. 1983. CV phonology: A generative theory of the syllable. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Goldsmith, J. A. (ed.). 1995. The handbook of phonological theory. Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell.
Gussman, E., S. R. Anderson, J. Bresnan, B. Comrie, W. Dressler, and C. J. Ewan.
2002. Phonology: Analysis and theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Hogg, R., and C. B. McCully. 1987. Metrical phonology: A coursebook. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hyman, L. M. 1975. Phonology: Theory and analysis. New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston.
Kaye, Jonathan. 1989. Phonology: A cognitive view. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Kenstowicz, M. J. 1994. Phonology in generative grammar. Oxford, UK: Blackwell
Publications.
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Exercises
Data in languages other than English are given in phonetic transcription without
square brackets unless otherwise stated. The phonetic transcriptions of English
words are given within square brackets.
1. The following sets of minimal pairs show that English /p/ and /b/ contrast
in initial, medial, and final positions.
Initial
Medial
Final
pit/bit
rapid/rabid
cap/cab
Find similar sets of minimal pairs for each pair of consonants given:
a. /k/—/g/
d. /b/—/v/
g. /s/—/ʃ/
b. /m/—/n/
e. /b/—/m/
h. /tʃ/—/dʒ/
c. /l/—/r/
f. /p/—/f/
i. /s/—/z/
2. A young patient at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, England, following a head injury, appears to have lost the spelling-to-pronunciation and
pronunciation-to-spelling rules that most of us can use to read and write
new words or nonsense strings. He also is unable to get to the phonemic
representation of words in his lexicon. Consider the following examples of
his reading pronunciation and his writing from dictation:
Stimulus
Reading Pronunciation
Writing from Dictation
fame
café
time
note
praise
treat
goes
float
/fæmi/
/sæfi/
/taɪmi/
/noti/ or /nɔti/
/pra-aɪ-si/
/tri-æt/
/go-ɛs/
/flɔ-æt/
FAM
KAFA
TIM
NOT
PRAZ
TRET
GOZ
FLOT
What rules or patterns relate his reading pronunciation to the written stimulus? What rules or patterns relate his spelling to the dictated stimulus? For
example, in reading, a corresponds to /a/ or /æ/; in writing from dictation
/e/ and /æ/ correspond to written A.
3. Read “A Case of Identity,” the third story in The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and no fair reading summaries, synopses, or anything other than the original—it’s online). Now all you have
to do is explain what complementary distribution has to do with this
mystery.
4. Consider the distribution of [r] and [l] in Korean in the following words.
(Some simplifying changes have been made in these transcriptions, and
those in exercise 6, that have no bearing on the problems.)
rubi
“ruby”
mul
“water”
kir-i
“road (nom.)”
pal
“arm”
Exercises
saram
irum-i
ratio
“person”
“name (nom.)”
“radio”
səul
ilgop
ibalsa
“Seoul”
“seven”
“barber”
Are [r] and [l] allophones of one or two phonemes?
a. Do they occur in any minimal pairs?
b. Are they in complementary distribution?
c. In what environments does each occur?
d. If you conclude that they are allophones of one phoneme, state the rule
that can derive the phonetic allophonic forms.
5. Consider these data from a common German dialect ([x] is a velar fricative,
[ç] is a palatal fricative).
nɪçt
“not”
baːx
“Bach”
reːçə̃n
“rake”
laːxə̃n
“to laugh”
ʃlɛçt
“bad”
kɔxt
“cooks”
riːçə̃n
“to smell”
fɛrsuːxə̃n “to try”
hãɪmlɪç “sly”
hoːx
“high”
rɛçts
“rightward”
ʃlʊxt
“canyon”
kriːçə̃n
“to crawl”
fɛrflʊxt
“accursed”
a. Are [x] and [ç] allophones of the same phoneme, or is each an allophone
of a separate phoneme? Give your reasons.
b. If you conclude that they are allophones of one phoneme, state the rule
that can derive the phonetic allophones.
6. Here are some additional data from Korean:
son
“hand”
ʃihap
“game”
som
“cotton”
ʃilsu
“mistake”
sosəl
“novel”
ʃipsam “thirteen”
sɛk
“color”
ʃinho
“signal”
isa
“moving”
maʃita “is delicious”
sal
“flesh”
oʃip
“fifty”
kasu
“singer”
miʃin
“superstition”
miso
“grin”
kaʃi
“thorn”
a. Are [s] and [ʃ] allophones of the same phoneme, or is each an allophone
of a separate phoneme? Give your reasons.
b. If you conclude that they are allophones of one phoneme, state the rule
that can derive the phonetic allophones.
7.
In Southern Kongo, a Bantu language spoken in Angola, the nonpalatal
segments [t,s,z] are in complementary distribution with their palatal counterparts [tʃ,ʃ,ʒ], as shown in the following words:
tobola
“to bore a hole”
tʃina
“to cut”
tanu
“five”
tʃiba
“banana”
kesoka
“to be cut”
ŋkoʃi
“lion”
kasu
“emaciation”
nselele
“termite”
kunezulu “heaven”
aʒimola
“alms”
nzwetu
“our”
lolonʒi
“to wash house”
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
zevo
ʒima
“then”
“to stretch”
zeŋga
tenisu
“to cut”
“tennis”
a. State the distribution of each pair of segments.
Example:
[t]—[tʃ]: [t] occurs before [o], [a], [e], and [u]; [tʃ] occurs
before [i].
[s]—[ʃ]:
[z]—[ʒ]:
b. Using considerations of simplicity, which phone should be used as the
underlying phoneme for each pair of nonpalatal and palatal segments in
Southern Kongo?
c. State in your own words the one phonological rule that will derive all
the phonetic segments from the phonemes. Do not state a separate rule
for each phoneme; a general rule can be stated that will apply to all
three phonemes you listed in (b). Try to give a formal statement of your
rule.
d. Which of the following are possible words in Southern Kongo, and
which are not?
i. tenesi
ii. lotʃunuta
iii. zevoʒiʒi
iv. ʃiʃi
v. ŋkasa
vi. iʒiloʒa
8. In some dialects of English, the following words have different vowels, as is
shown by the phonetic transcriptions:
A
bite
rice
ripe
wife
dike
B
[bʌɪt]
[rʌɪs]
[rʌɪp]
[wʌɪf]
[dʌɪk]
bide
rise
bribe
wives
dime
nine
rile
dire
writhe
C
[baɪd]
[raɪz]
[braɪb]
[waɪvz]
[dãɪm]
[nãɪn]
[raɪl]
[daɪr]
[raɪð]
die
by
sigh
rye
guy
[daɪ]
[baɪ]
[saɪ]
[raɪ]
[gaɪ]
a. How may the classes of sounds that end the words in columns A and B
be characterized? That is, what feature specifies all the final segments
in A and all the final segments in B?
b. How do the words in column C differ from those in columns A and B?
c. Are [ʌɪ] and [aɪ] in complementary distribution? Give your reasons.
d. If [ʌɪ] and [aɪ] are allophones of one phoneme, should they be derived
from /ʌɪ/ or /aɪ/? Why?
e. Give the phonetic representations of the following words as they would
be spoken in the dialect described here:
life __________
lives ___________
lie ___________
file __________
bike ___________
lice ___________
f. Formulate a rule that will relate the phonemic representations to the
phonetic representations of the words given above.
Exercises
9.
Pairs like top and chop, dunk and junk, so and show, and Caesar and
seizure reveal that /t/ and /tʃ/, /d/ and /dʒ/, /s/ and /ʃ/, and /z/ and /ʒ/ are
distinct phonemes in English. Consider these same pairs of nonpalatalized
and palatalized consonants in the following data. (The palatal forms are
optional forms that often occur in casual speech.)
Nonpalatalized
Palatalized
[hɪt mi]
[lid hĩm]
[pʰæs ʌs]
[luz ðem]
[hɪtʃ ju]
[lidʒ ju]
[pʰæʃ ju]
[luʒ ju]
“hit me”
“lead him”
“pass us”
“lose them”
“hit you”
“lead you”
“pass you”
“lose you”
Formulate the rule that specifies when /t/, /d/, /s/, and /z/ become palatalized
as [tʃ], [dʒ], [ʃ], and [ʒ]. Restate the rule using feature notations. Does the
formal statement reveal the generalizations?
10. Here are some Japanese words in broad phonetic transcription. Note that
[ts] is an alveolar affricate and should be taken as a single symbol just like
the palatal fricative [tʃ]. It is pronounced as the initial sound in tsunami.
Japanese words (except certain loan words) never contain the phonetic
sequences *[ti] or *[tu].
tatami
“mat”
tomodatʃi “friend”
utʃi
“house”
tegami
“letter”
totemo
“very”
otoko
“male”
tʃitʃi
“father”
tsukue
“desk”
tetsudau “help”
ʃita
“under”
ato
“later”
matsu
“wait”
natsu
“summer”
tsutsumu
“wrap”
tʃizu
“map”
kata
“person”
tatemono “building”
te
“hand”
a. Based on these data, are [t], [tʃ], and [ts] in complementary distribution?
b. State the distribution—first in words, then using features—of these
phones.
c. Give a phonemic analysis of these data insofar as [t], [tʃ], and [ts] are
concerned. That is, identify the phonemes and the allophones.
d. Give the phonemic representation of the phonetically transcribed Japanese words shown as follows. Assume phonemic and phonetic representations are the same except for [t], [tʃ], and [ts].
tatami /__________/
tsukue /_________/
tsutsumu /_______/
tomodatʃi /_______/
tetsudau /________/
tʃizu /___________/
utʃi /____________/
ʃita /____________/
kata /___________/
tegami /_________/
ato /____________/
koto /___________/
totemo /_________/
matsu /__________/
tatemono /_______/
otoko /__________/
degutʃi /_________/
te /_____________/
tʃitʃi /___________/
natsu /__________/
tsuri /___________/
11. The following words are Paku, a language created by V. Fromkin, spoken
by the Pakuni in the cult classic Land of the Lost, originally an NBC television series and recently a major motion picture. The acute accent indicates
a stressed vowel.
a. ótu
“evil” (N)
c. etógo
“cactus” (sg)
b. túsa
“evil” (Adj)
d. etogṍni
“cactus” (pl)
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
páku
“Paku” (sg)
j. ãmpṍni
“hairless ones”
pakṹ ni
“Paku” (pl)
k. ã́ ́mi
“mother”
́
épo
“hair”
l. ãmĩ ni
“mothers”
mpósa
“hairless”
m. áda
“father”
́
ã́ ́mpo
“hairless one”
n. adãni
“fathers”
i. Is stress predictable? If so, what is the rule?
ii. Is nasalization a distinctive feature for vowels? Give the reasons for
your answer.
iii. How are plurals formed in Paku?
12. Consider the following English verbs. Those in column A have stress on the
penultimate (next-to-last) syllable, whereas the verbs in column B and C
have their last syllable stressed.
A
B
C
astónish
collápse
amáze
éxit
exíst
impróve
imágine
resént
surpríse
cáncel
revólt
combíne
elícit
adópt
belíeve
práctice
insíst
atóne
a. Transcribe the words under columns A, B, and C phonemically. (Use a
schwa for the unstressed vowels even if they can be derived from different phonemic vowels. This should make it easier for you.)
e.g., astonish /əstanɪʃ/, collapse /kəlæps/, amaze /əmez/
b. Consider the phonemic structure of the stressed syllables in these verbs.
What is the difference between the final syllables of the verbs in columns A and B? Formulate a rule that predicts where stress occurs in the
verbs in columns A and B.
c. In the verbs in column C, stress also occurs on the final syllable. What
must you add to the rule to account for this fact? (Hint: For the forms
in columns A and B, the final consonants had to be considered; for the
forms in column C, consider the vowels.)
13. Following are listed the phonetic transcriptions of ten “words.” Some are
English words, some are not words now but are possible words or nonsense
words, and others are not possible because they violate English sequential
constraints.
Write the English words in regular spelling. Mark the other words as
possible or not possible. For each word you mark as “not possible,” state
your reason.
Word
Example:
[θrot]
[slig]
[lsig]
Possible
Not Possible
Reason
X
No English word can begin
with a liquid followed by
an obstruent.
throat
X
Exercises
Word
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
Possible
Not Possible
Reason
[pʰril]
[skritʃ]
[kʰno]
[maɪ]
[gnostɪk]
[jũnəkʰɔrn]
[fruit]
[blaft]
[ŋar]
[æpəpʰlɛksi]
14. Consider these phonetic forms of Hebrew words:
[v]—[b]
bika
mugbal
ʃavar
ʃavra
ʔikev
bara
[f]—[p]
“lamented”
“limited”
“broke” (masc.)
“broke” (fem.)
“delayed”
“created”
litef
sefer
sataf
para
mitpaxat
haʔalpim
“stroked”
“book”
“washed”
“cow”
“handkerchief”
“the Alps”
Assume that these words and their phonetic sequences are representative
of what may occur in Hebrew. In your answers, consider classes of sounds
rather than individual sounds.
a. Are [b] and [v] allophones of one phoneme? Are they in complementary
distribution? In what phonetic environments do they occur? Can you
formulate a phonological rule stating their distribution?
b. Does the same rule, or lack of a rule, that describes the distribution of
[b] and [v] apply to [p] and [f]? If not, why not?
c. Here is a word with one phone missing. A blank appears in place of the
missing sound: hid___ik.
Check the one correct statement.
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
[b] but not [v] could occur in the empty slot.
[v] but not [b] could occur in the empty slot.
Either [b] or [v] could occur in the empty slot.
Neither [b] nor [v] could occur in the empty slot.
d. Which of the following statements is correct about the incomplete word
___ana?
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
[f] but not [p] could occur in the empty slot.
[p] but not [f] could occur in the empty slot.
Either [p] or [f] could fill the blank.
Neither [p] nor [f] could fill the blank.
e. Now consider the following possible words (in phonetic transcription):
laval
surva
labal
palar
falu
razif
If these words actually occurred in Hebrew, would they:
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
i.
Force you to revise the conclusions about the distribution of labial
stops and fricatives you reached on the basis of the first group of
words given above?
ii. Support your original conclusions?
iii. Neither support nor disprove your original conclusions?
15. Consider these data from the African language Maninka.
bugo
“hit”
bugoli
“hitting”
dila
“repair”
dilali
“repairing”
don
“come in”
donni
“coming in”
dumu
“eat”
dumuni
“eating”
gwen
“chase”
gwenni
“chasing”
a. What are the two forms of the morpheme meaning “-ing”?
(1) _____________________ (2) _____________________
b. Can you predict which phonetic form will occur? If so, state the rule.
c. What are the “-ing” forms for the following verbs?
da
“lie down” __________
men “hear” ______________
famu “understand” ___________
d. What does the rule that you formulated predict for the “-ing” form of
sunogo “sleep” ________________
e. If your rule predicts sunogoli, modify it to predict sunogoni without
affecting the other occurrences of -li. Conversely, if your rule predicts
sunogoni, modify it to predict sunogoli without affecting the other
occurrences of -ni.
16. Consider the following phonetic data from the Bantu language Luganda.
(The data have been somewhat altered to make the problem easier.) In each
line except the last, the same root occurs in both columns A and B, but it
has one prefix in column A, meaning “a” or “an,” and another prefix in
column B, meaning “little.”
A
ẽnato
ẽnapo
ẽnobi
ẽmpipi
ẽŋkoːsa
ẽmːãːmːo
ẽŋːõːmːe
ẽnːĩmiro
ẽnugẽni
B
“a canoe”
“a house”
“an animal”
“a kidney”
“a feather”
“a peg”
“a horn”
“a garden”
“a stranger”
akaːto
akaːpo
akaobi
akapipi
akakoːsa
akabãːmːo
akagõːmːe
akadĩmiro
akatabi
“little canoe”
“little house”
“little animal”
“little kidney”
“little feather”
“little peg”
“little horn”
“little garden”
“little branch”
Base your answers to the following questions on only these forms. Assume
that all the words in the language follow the regularities shown here. (Hint:
You may write long segments such as /mː/ as /mm/ to help you visualize
more clearly the phonological processes taking place.)
Exercises
a. Are nasal vowels in Luganda phonemic? Are they predictable?
b. Is the phonemic representation of the morpheme meaning “garden”
/dimiro/?
c. What is the phonemic representation of the morpheme meaning
“canoe”?
d. Are [p] and [b] allophones of one phoneme?
e. If /am/ represents a bound prefix morpheme in Luganda, can you conclude that [ãmdãno] is a possible phonetic form for a word in this language starting with this prefix?
f. Is there a homorganic nasal rule in Luganda?
g. If the phonetic representation of the word meaning “little boy” is
[akapoːbe], give the phonemic and phonetic representations for “a boy.”
Phonemic____________________ Phonetic ____________________
h. Which of the following forms is the phonemic representation for the
prefix meaning “a” or “an”?
i. /en/
ii. /ẽn/
iii. /ẽm/
iv. /em/
v. /eː/
i.
j.
What is the phonetic representation of the word meaning “a branch”?
What is the phonemic representation of the word meaning “little
stranger”?
k. State the three phonological rules revealed by the Luganda data.
17. Here are some Japanese verb forms given in broad phonetic transcription.
They represent two styles (informal and formal) of present-tense verbs.
Morphemes are separated by +.
Gloss
Informal
Formal
call
write
eat
see
leave
go out
die
close
swindle
wear
read
lend
wait
press
apply
drop
have
win
steal a lover
yob + u
kak + u
tabe + ru
mi + ru
de + ru
dekake + ru
ʃin + u
ʃime + ru
katar + u
ki + ru
yom + u
kas + u
mats + u
os + u
ate + ru
otos + u
mots + u
kats + u
netor + u
yob + imasu
kak + imasu
tabe + masu
mi + masu
de + masu
dekake + masu
ʃin + imasu
ʃime + masu
katar + imasu
ki + masu
yom + imasu
kaʃ + imasu
matʃ + imasu
oʃ + imasu
ate + masu
otoʃ + imasu
motʃ + imasu
katʃ + imasu
netor + imasu
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
a. List each of the Japanese verb roots in their phonemic representations.
b. Formulate the rule that accounts for the different phonetic forms of
these verb roots.
c. There is more than one allomorph for the suffix designating formality
and more than one for the suffix designating informality. List the allomorphs of each. Formulate the rule or rules for their distribution.
18. Consider these data from the Native American language Ojibwa.1 (The
data have been somewhat altered for the sake of simplicity; /c/ is a palatal
stop.)
anokːiː
“she works”
nitanokːiː
“I work”
aːkːosi
“she is sick”
nitaːkːosi
“I am sick”
ayeːkːosi “she is tired”
kiʃayeːkːosi “you are tired”
ineːntam “she thinks”
kiʃineːntam “you think”
maːcaː
“she leaves”
nimaːcaː
“I leave”
takoʃːin
“she arrives”
nitakoʃːin
“I arrive”
pakiso
“she swims”
kipakiso
“you swim”
wiːsini
“she eats”
kiwiːsini
“you eat”
a. What forms do the morphemes meaning “I” and “you” take; that is,
what are the allomorphs?
b. Are the allomorphs for “I” in complementary distribution? How about
for “you”?
c. Assuming that we want one phonemic form to underlie each allomorph,
what should it be?
d. State a rule that derives the phonetic forms of the allomorphs. Make
it as general as possible; that is, refer to a broad natural class in the
environment of the rule. You may state the rule formally, in words, or
partially in words with some formal abbreviations.
e. Is the rule a morphophonemic rule; that is, does it (most likely) apply to
specific morphemes but not in general? What evidence do you see in the
data to suggest your answer?
19. Consider these data from the Burmese language, spoken in Myanmar. The
small ring under the nasal consonants indicates a voiceless nasal. Tones
have been omitted, as they play no role in this problem.
ma
“health”
n̥eɪ
“unhurried”
na
“pain”
m̥ i
“flame”
mjiʔ “river”
m̥ on “flour”
nwe “to flex”
m̥ a
“order”
nwa “cow”
n̥weɪ “heat” (verb)
mi
“flame”
n̥a
“nostril”
Are [m] and [m̥ ] and [n] and [n̥] allophones or phonemic? Present evidence
to support your conclusion.
1From
Baker, C. L. & John McCarthy. “The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition,”
Table: Example of Ojibwa allomorphy. © 1981 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by
permission of The MIT Press.
Exercises
20. Here are some short sentences in a made-up language called Wakanti.
(Long consonants are written as doubled letters to make the analysis
easier.)
aba
ideɪ
aguʊ
upi
atu
ika
ijama
aweli
ioa
aie
ulamaba
“I eat”
“You sleep”
“I go”
“We come”
“I walk”
“You see”
“You found out”
“I climbed up”
“You fell”
“I hunt”
“We put on top”
amma
inneɪ
aŋŋuʊ
umpi
antu
iŋka
injama
amweli
inoa
anie
unlamaba
“I don’t eat”
“You don’t sleep”
“I don’t go”
“We don’t come”
“I don’t walk”
“You don’t see”
“You didn’t find out”
“I didn’t climb up”
“You didn’t fall”
“I don’t hunt”
“We don’t put on top”
a. What is the phonemic form of the negative morpheme based on these
data?
b. What are its allomorphs?
c. State a rule that derives the phonetic form of the allomorphs from the
underlying, phonemic form.
d. Another phonological rule applies to these data. State explicitly what
the rule does and to what natural class of consonants it applies.
e. Give the phonemic forms for all the negative sentences.
21. Here are some data from French:
Phonetic
Gloss
pəti tablo
no tablo
pəti livr
no livr
pəti navɛ
no navɛ
pətit ami
noz ami
pətit wazo
noz wazo
“small picture”
“our pictures”
“small book”
“our books”
“small turnip”
“our turnips”
“small friend”
“our friends”
“small bird”
“our birds”
a. What are the two forms for the words “small” and “our”?
b. What are the phonetic environments that determine the occurrence of
each form?
c. Can you express the environment by referring to word boundaries and
using exactly one phonetic feature, which will refer to a certain natural
class? (Hint: A more detailed phonetic transcription would show the
word boundaries (#), e.g., [#no##livr#].)
d. What are the basic or phonemic forms?
e. State a rule in words that derives the nonbasic forms from the basic
ones.
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
f. Challenge exercise: State the rule formally, using ∅ to represent “null”
and # to represent a word boundary.
22. Consider these pairs of semantically related phonetic forms and glosses in a
commonly known language (the + indicates a morpheme boundary):
Phonetic
Gloss
Phonetic
Gloss
[bãm]
explosive device
[bãmb + ard]
[kʰrʌ̃ m]
[aɪæ̃m]
a morsel or bit
a metrical foot
[kʰrʌ̃ mb + əl]
[aɪæ̃mb + ɪc]
[θʌ̃ m]
an opposable digit
[θʌ̃ mb + əlĩnə]
to attack with explosive
devices
to break into bits
consisting of metrical
feet
a tiny woman of fairy
tales
a. What are the two allomorphs of the root morpheme in each line of
data?
b. What is the phonemic form of the underlying root morpheme? (Hint:
Consider pairs such as atom/atomic and form/formal before you
decide.)
c. State a rule that derives the allomorphs.
d. Spell these words using the English alphabet.
23. Consider these data from Hebrew. (Note: ts is an alveolar sibilant fricative
and should be considered one sound, just as sh stands for the palatal fricative [ʃ]. The word lehit is a reflexive pronoun.)
Nonsibilant–Initial Verbs
Sibilant–Initial Verbs
kabel
lehit-kabel
“to accept”
“to be accepted”
pater
lehit-pater
“to fire”
“to resign”
bayesh
lehit-bayesh
“to shame”
“to be ashamed”
tsadek
lehits-tadek
(not *lehit-tsadek)
shamesh
lehish-tamesh
(not *lehit-shamesh)
sader
lehis-tader
(not *lehit-sader)
“to justify”
“to apologize”
“to use for”
“to use”
“to arrange”
“to arrange
oneself”
a. Describe the phonological change taking place in the second column of
Hebrew data.
b. Describe in words as specifically as possible a phonological rule that
accounts for the change. Make sure your rule doesn’t affect the data in
the first column of Hebrew.
24. Here are some Japanese data, many of them from exercise 10, in a fine
enough phonetic transcription to show voiceless vowels (the ones with the
little ring under them).
Exercises
Word
Gloss
Word
Gloss
Word
Gloss
tatami
tegami
su̥kiyaki
tʃi ̥tʃi
ʃi ̥ta
degutʃi
natsu
kata
matsu̥ʃi ̥ta
mat
letter
sukiyaki
father
under
exit
summer
person
(a proper
name)
tomodatʃi
totemo
ki ̥setsu
tsu̥kue
ki ̥ta
tsuri
tsu̥tsumu
fu̥ton
etsu̥ko
friend
very
season
desk
north
fishing
wrap
futon
(a girl’s
name)
utʃi
otoko
busata
tetsudau
matsu
ki ̥setsu
tʃizu
fugi
fu̥kuan
house
male
silence
help
wait
mistress
map
discuss
a plan
a. Which vowels may occur voiceless?
b. Are they in complementary distribution with their voiced counterparts?
If so, state the distribution.
c. Are the voiced/voiceless pairs allophones of the same phoneme?
d. State in words, or write in formal notation if you can, the rule for determining the allophones of the vowels that have voiceless allophones.
25. With regard to English plural and past-tense rules, we observed that the
two parts of the rules must be carried out in the proper order. If we reverse
the order, we would get *[bʌsəs] instead of [bʌsəz] for the plural of bus (as
illustrated in the text), and *[stetət] instead of [stetəd] for the past tense of
state. Although constraints A and B (given below) are the motivation for
the plural and past-tense rules, both the correct and incorrect plural and
past-tense forms are consistent with those constraints. What additional
constraint is needed to prevent [bʌsəs] and [stetət] from being generated?
(A) Obstruent sequences may not differ with respect to their voice feature
at the end of a word.
(B) Sequences of obstruents that differ at most with respect to voicing are
not permitted within English words.
26. There is a rule of word-final obstruent devoicing in German (e.g., German
/bund/ is pronounced [bũnt]). This rule is actually a manifestation of the
constraint:
Voiced obstruents are not permitted at the end of a word.
Given that this constraint is universal, explain why English band /bænd/ is
nevertheless pronounced [bæ̃nd], not [bæ̃nt], in terms of Optimality Theory
(OT).
27. For many English speakers, word-final /z/ is devoiced when the /z/ represents a separate morpheme. These speakers pronounce plurals such as
dogs, days, and dishes as [dɔgs], [des], and [dɪʃəs] instead of [dɔgz], [dez],
and [dɪʃəz]. Furthermore, they pronounce possessives such as Dan’s, Jay’s,
and Liz’s as [dæ̃ns], [dʒes], and [lɪzəs] instead of [dæ̃nz], [dʒez], and [lɪzez].
Finally, they pronounce third-person singular verb forms such as reads,
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CHAPTER 5 Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language
goes, and fusses as [rids], [gos], and [fʌsəs] instead of [ridz], [goz], and
[fʌsəz].
(However, words such as daze and Franz are still pronounced [dez]
and [frænz], because the /z/ is not a separate morpheme. Interestingly, in
this dialect Franz and Fran’s are not homophones, nor are daze and day’s.)
How might OT explain this phenomenon?
28. In German the third-person singular suffix is -t. Following are three German verb stems (underlying forms) and the third-person forms of these
verbs:
Stem
Third person
/loːb/
/zag/
/raɪz/
[loːpt]
[zakt]
[raɪst]
he praises
he says
he travels
The final consonant of the verb stem undergoes devoicing in the thirdperson form, even though it is not at the end of the word. What constraint
is operating to devoice the final stem consonant? How is this similar to or
different from the constraint that operates in the English plural and past
tense?
3
The Biology and
Psychology of Language
The field of psycholinguistics, or the psychology of language, is concerned with
discovering the psychological processes that make it possible for humans to
acquire and use language.
J E A N B E R K O G L E A S O N A N D N A N B E R N S T E I N R AT N E R ,
Psycholinguistics, 1993
6
What Is Language?
When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the “human
essence,” the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man.
NOAM CHOMSKY, Language and Mind, 1968
Whatever else people do when they come together—whether they play, fight,
make love, or make automobiles—they talk. We live in a world of language.
We talk to our friends, our associates, our wives and husbands, our lovers, our
teachers, our parents, our rivals, and even our enemies. We talk to bus drivers and total strangers. We talk face-to-face and over the telephone, and everyone responds with more talk. Television and radio further swell this torrent of
words. Hardly a moment of our waking lives is free from words, and even in
our dreams we talk and are talked to. We also talk when there is no one to
answer. Some of us talk aloud in our sleep. We talk to our pets and sometimes
to ourselves.
The possession of language, perhaps more than any other attribute, distinguishes humans from other animals. To understand our humanity, one must
understand the nature of language that makes us human. According to the philosophy expressed in the myths and religions of many peoples, language is the
source of human life and power. To some people of Africa, a newborn child is a
kintu, a “thing,” not yet a muntu, a “person.” Only by the act of learning language does the child become a human being. According to this tradition, we all
become “human” because we all know at least one language. But what does it
mean to “know” a language?
Linguistic Knowledge
Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know?
CYNTHIA OZICK, “What Helen Keller Saw,” New Yorker, June 16 & 23, 2003
284
Linguistic Knowledge
When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who
know that language. This means you have the capacity to produce sounds that
signify certain meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds produced
by others. But language is much more than speech. Deaf people produce and
understand sign languages just as hearing persons produce and understand spoken languages. The languages of the deaf communities throughout the world are
equivalent to spoken languages, differing only in their modality of expression.
Most everyone knows at least one language. Five-year-old children are nearly
as proficient at speaking and understanding as their parents. Yet the ability to
carry out the simplest conversation requires profound knowledge that most
speakers are unaware of. This is true for speakers of all languages, from Albanian to Zulu. A speaker of English can produce a sentence having two relative
clauses without knowing what a relative clause is, such as
My goddaughter who was born in Sweden and who now lives in Iowa is
named Disa, after a Viking queen.
In a parallel fashion, a child can walk without understanding or being able to
explain the principles of balance and support or the neurophysiological control
mechanisms that permit one to do so. The fact that we may know something
unconsciously is not unique to language.
What, then, do speakers of English or Quechua or French or Mohawk or
Arabic know?
Knowledge of the Sound System
“B.C.” © 1994 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Reprinted by permission of John L. Hart FLP and Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Part of knowing a language means knowing what sounds (or signs1) are in that
language and what sounds are not. One way this unconscious knowledge is
revealed is by the way speakers of one language pronounce words from another
1The
sign languages of the deaf will be discussed throughout the book. A reference to “language,” then, unless speech sounds or spoken languages are specifically mentioned, includes
both spoken and signed languages.
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CHAPTER 6 What Is Language?
language. If you speak only English, for example, you may substitute an English
sound for a non-English sound when pronouncing “foreign” words like French
ménage à trois. If you pronounce it as the French do you are using sounds outside the English sound system.
French people speaking English often pronounce words like this and that as if
they were spelled zis and zat. The English sound represented by the initial letters
th in these words is not part of the French sound system, and the French mispronunciation reveals the speaker’s unconscious knowledge of this fact.
Knowing the sound system of a language includes more than knowing the
inventory of sounds. It means also knowing which sounds may start a word, end
a word, and follow each other. The name of a former president of Ghana was
Nkrumah, pronounced with an initial sound like the sound ending the English
word sink. While this is an English sound, no word in English begins with the
nk sound. Speakers of English who have occasion to pronounce this name often
mispronounce it (by Ghanaian standards) by inserting a short vowel sound, like
Nekrumah or Enkrumah. Children who learn English recognize that nk cannot
begin a word, just as Ghanaian children learn that words in their language can
and do begin with the nk sound.
We will learn more about sounds and sound systems in chapters 4 and 5.
Knowledge of Words
Knowing the sounds and sound patterns in our language constitutes only one
part of our linguistic knowledge. Knowing a language means also knowing that
certain sequences of sounds signify certain concepts or meanings. Speakers of
English know what boy means, and that it means something different from toy
or girl or pterodactyl. You also know that toy and boy are words, but moy is
not. When you know a language, you know words in that language, that is,
which sequences of sounds are related to specific meanings and which are not.
Arbitrary Relation of Form and Meaning
The minute I set eyes on an animal I know what it is. I don’t have to reflect a moment;
the right name comes out instantly. I seem to know just by the shape of the creature and
the way it acts what animal it is. When the dodo came along he [Adam] thought it was a
wildcat. But I saved him. I just spoke up in a quite natural way and said, “Well, I do declare
if there isn’t the dodo!”
MARK TWAIN, Eve’s Diary, 1906
If you do not know a language, the words (and sentences) of that language will
be mainly incomprehensible, because the relationship between speech sounds
and the meanings they represent is, for the most part, an arbitrary one. When
you are acquiring a language you have to learn that the sounds represented by
the letters house signify the concept
; if you know French, this same meaning is represented by maison; if you know Russian, by dom; if you know Spanish, by casa. Similarly,
is represented by hand in English, main in French,
nsa in Twi, and ruka in Russian.
Linguistic Knowledge
The following are words in some different languages. How many of them can
you understand?
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
kyinii
doakam
odun
asa
toowq
bolna
wartawan
inaminatu
yawwa
People who know the languages from which these words are taken understand that they have the following meanings:
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
a large parasol (in Twi, a Ghanaian language)
living creature (in Tohono O’odham, an American Indian language)
wood (in Turkish)
morning (in Japanese)
is seeing (in Luiseño, a California Indian language)
to speak (in Hindi-Urdu); aching (in Russian)
reporter (in Indonesian)
teacher (in Warao, a Venezuelan Indian language)
right on! (in Hausa, a Nigerian language)
“Herman”® is reprinted with permission from Laughing Stock Licensing Inc., Ottawa, Canada. All rights
reserved.
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CHAPTER 6 What Is Language?
These examples show that the words of a particular language have the meanings they do only by convention. Despite what Eve says in Mark Twain’s satire
Eve’s Diary, a pterodactyl could have been called ron, blick, or kerplunkity.
As Juliet says in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
This conventional and arbitrary relationship between the form (sounds) and
meaning (concept) of a word is also true in sign languages. If you see someone
using a sign language you do not know, it is doubtful that you will understand
the message from the signs alone. A person who knows Chinese Sign Language
(CSL) would find it difficult to understand American Sign Language (ASL), and
vice versa, as illustrated in Figure 6.1.
Many signs were originally like miming, where the relationship between form
and meaning is not arbitrary. Bringing the hand to the mouth to mean “eating,” as in miming, would be nonarbitrary as a sign. Over time these signs may
change, just as the pronunciation of words changes, and the miming effect is
lost. These signs become conventional, so that knowing the shape or movement
of the hands does not reveal the meaning of the gestures in sign languages, as
also shown in Figure 6.1.
FATHER (ASL)
FATHER (CSL)
SUSPECT (ASL)
SUSPECT (CSL)
FIGURE 6.1 | Arbitrary relation between gestures and meanings of the signs for father
and suspect in ASL and CSL.2
Copyright © 1987 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press.
2 From
Poizner, Howard, Edward Klima, and Ursula Bellugi. “What the Hands Reveal about
the Brain” figure: “Arbitrary relationship between gestures and meanings in ASL and CSL,”
Copyright © 1987 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press.
Linguistic Knowledge
There is some sound symbolism in language—that is, words whose pronunciation suggests the meaning. Most languages contain onomatopoeic words like
buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions
they refer to. But even here, the sounds differ from language to language, reflecting the particular sound system of the language. In English cock-a-doodle-doo
is an onomatopoeic word whose meaning is the crow of a rooster, whereas in
Finnish the rooster’s crow is kukkokiekuu. Forget gobble gobble when you’re in
Istanbul; a turkey in Turkey goes glu-glu.
Sometimes particular sound sequences seem to relate to a particular concept.
In English many words beginning with gl relate to sight, such as glare, glint,
gleam, glitter, glossy, glaze, glance, glimmer, glimpse, and glisten. However, gl
words and their like are a very small part of any language, and gl may have nothing to do with “sight” in another language, or even in other words in English,
such as gladiator, glucose, glory, glutton, globe, and so on.
English speakers know the gl words that relate to sight and those that do
not; they know the onomatopoeic words and all the words in the basic vocabulary of the language. No speaker of English knows all 472,000 entries in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. And even if someone did know all
the words in Webster’s, that person would still not know English. Imagine trying to learn a foreign language by buying a dictionary and memorizing words.
No matter how many words you learned, you would not be able to form the
simplest phrases or sentences in the language, or understand a native speaker.
No one speaks in isolated words. Of course, you could search in your traveler’s
dictionary for individual words to find out how to say something like “car—
gas—where?” After many tries, a native might understand this question and
then point in the direction of a gas station. If he answered you with a sentence,
however, you probably would not understand what was said or be able to look
it up, because you would not know where one word ended and another began.
Chapter 2 will discuss how words are put together to form phrases and sentences, and chapter 3 will explore word and sentence meanings.
The Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge
Albert: So are you saying that you were the best friend of the woman who was married to
the man who represented your husband in divorce?
André: In the history of speech, that sentence has never been uttered before.
NEIL SIMON, The Dinner Party, 2000
Knowledge of a language enables you to combine sounds to form words, words
to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. You cannot buy a dictionary
or phrase book of any language with all the sentences of the language. No dictionary can list all the possible sentences, because the number of sentences in
a language is infinite. Knowing a language means being able to produce new
sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before.
The linguist Noam Chomsky, one of the people most responsible for the modern revolution in language and cognitive science, refers to this ability as part of
the creative aspect of language use. Not every speaker of a language can create
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great literature, but everybody who knows a language can and does create new
sentences when speaking and understands new sentences created by others, a
fact expressed more than 400 years ago by Huarte de San Juan (1530–1592):
“Normal human minds are such that . . . without the help of anybody, they will
produce 1,000 (sentences) they never heard spoke of . . . inventing and saying
such things as they never heard from their masters, nor any mouth.”
In pointing out the creative aspect of language, Chomsky made a powerful
argument against the behaviorist view of language that prevailed in the first half
of the twentieth century, which held that language is a set of learned responses
to stimuli. While it is true that if someone steps on your toes you may automatically respond with a scream or a grunt, these sounds are not part of language.
They are involuntary reactions to stimuli. After we reflexively cry out, we can
then go on to say: “Thank you very much for stepping on my toe, because I was
afraid I had elephantiasis and now that I can feel the pain I know I don’t,” or
any one of an infinite number of sentences, because the particular sentences we
produce are not controlled by any stimulus.
Even some involuntary cries like “ouch” are constrained by our own language system, as are the filled pauses that are sprinkled through conversational
speech, such as er, uh, and you know in English. They contain only the sounds
found in the language. French speakers, for example, often fill their pauses with
the vowel sound that starts their word for egg—oeuf—a sound that does not
occur in English.
Our creative ability is reflected not only in what we say but also includes
our understanding of new or novel sentences. Consider the following sentence:
“Daniel Boone decided to become a pioneer because he dreamed of pigeon-toed
giraffes and cross-eyed elephants dancing in pink skirts and green berets on the
wind-swept plains of the Midwest.” You may not believe the sentence; you may
question its logic; but you can understand it, although you have probably never
heard or read it before now.
Knowledge of a language, then, makes it possible to understand and produce
new sentences. If you counted the number of sentences in this book that you
have seen or heard before, the number would be small. Next time you write an
essay or a letter, see how many of your sentences are new. Few sentences are
stored in your brain, to be pulled out to fit some situation or matched with some
sentence that you hear. Novel sentences never spoken or heard before cannot be
stored in your memory.
Simple memorization of all the possible sentences in a language is impossible in principle. If for every sentence in the language a longer sentence can be
formed, then there is no limit to the number of sentences. In English you can
say:
This is the house.
or
This is the house that Jack built.
or
This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
Linguistic Knowledge
or
This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that
lay in the house that Jack built.
And you need not stop there. How long, then, is the longest sentence? A speaker
of English can say:
The old man came.
or
The old, old, old, old, old man came.
How many “olds” are too many? Seven? Twenty-three?
It is true that the longer these sentences become, the less likely we would be to
hear or to say them. A sentence with 276 occurrences of “old” would be highly
unusual in either speech or writing, even to describe Methuselah. But such a sentence is theoretically possible. If you know English, you have the knowledge to
add any number of adjectives as modifiers to a noun and to form sentences with
an indefinite number of clauses, as in “the house that Jack built.”
All human languages permit their speakers to increase the length and complexity of sentences in these ways; creativity is a universal property of human
language.
Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentences
To memorize and store an infinite set of sentences would require an infinite storage capacity. However, the brain is finite, and even if it were not, we could not
store novel sentences, which are, well, novel. When you learn a language you
must learn something finite—your vocabulary is finite (however large it may
be)—and that can be stored. If sentences were formed simply by placing one
word after another in any order, then a language could be defined simply as a set
of words. But you can see that knowledge of words is not enough by examining
the following strings of words:
1. a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
John kissed the little old lady who owned the shaggy dog.
Who owned the shaggy dog John kissed the little old lady.
John is difficult to love.
It is difficult to love John.
John is anxious to go.
It is anxious to go John.
John, who was a student, flunked his exams.
Exams his flunked student a was who John.
If you were asked to put an asterisk or star before the examples that seemed
ill formed or ungrammatical or “no good” to you, which ones would you mark?
Our intuitive knowledge about what is or is not an allowable sentence in English
convinces us to star b, f, and h. Which ones did you star?
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CHAPTER 6 What Is Language?
Would you agree with the following judgments?
2.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
What he did was climb a tree.
*What he thought was want a sports car.3
Drink your beer and go home!
*What are drinking and go home?
I expect them to arrive a week from next Thursday.
*I expect a week from next Thursday to arrive them.
Linus lost his security blanket.
*Lost Linus security blanket his.
If you find the starred sentences unacceptable, as we do, you see that not
every string of words constitutes a well-formed sentence in a language. Our
knowledge of a language determines which strings of words are well-formed
sentences and which are not. Therefore, in addition to knowing the words of the
language, linguistic knowledge includes rules for forming sentences and making
the kinds of judgments you made about the examples in (1) and (2). These rules
must be finite in length and finite in number so that they can be stored in our
finite brains. Yet, they must permit us to form and understand an infinite set of
new sentences. They are not rules determined by a judge or a legislature, or even
rules taught in a grammar class. They are unconscious rules that we acquire as
young children as we develop language.
A language, then, consists of all the sounds, words, and infinitely many possible sentences. When you know a language, you know the sounds, the words,
and the rules for their combination.
Linguistic Knowledge and Performance
“What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and
one?” “I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.” “She can’t do Addition,” the Red Queen
interrupted.
LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
Our linguistic knowledge permits us to form longer and longer sentences by joining sentences and phrases together or adding modifiers to a noun. Whether we
stop at three, five, or eighteen adjectives, it is impossible to limit the number we
could add if desired. Very long sentences are theoretically possible, but they are
highly improbable. Evidently, there is a difference between having the knowledge necessary to produce sentences of a language and applying this knowledge.
It is a difference between what we know, which is our linguistic competence,
and how we use this knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension, which is our linguistic performance.
Speakers of all languages have the knowledge to understand or produce sentences of any length. Here is an example from the ruling of a federal judge:
3The
asterisk is used before examples that speakers find ungrammatical. This notation will be
used throughout the book.
Linguistic Knowledge
We invalidate the challenged lifetime ban because we hold as a matter of
federal constitutional law that a state initiative measure cannot impose
a severe limitation on the people’s fundamental rights when the issue of
whether to impose such a limitation on these rights is put to the voters in a
measure that is ambiguous on its face and that fails to mention in its text,
the proponent’s ballot argument, or the state’s official description, the severe
limitation to be imposed.
However, there are physiological and psychological reasons that limit the
number of adjectives, adverbs, clauses, and so on that we actually produce and
understand. Speakers may run out of breath, lose track of what they have said,
or die of old age before they are finished. Listeners may become confused, tired,
bored, or disgusted.
When we speak, we usually wish to convey some message. At some stage
in the act of producing speech, we must organize our thoughts into strings of
words. Sometimes the message is garbled. We may stammer, or pause, or produce slips of the tongue. We may even sound like Hattie in the cartoon, who
illustrates the difference between linguistic knowledge and the way we use that
knowledge in performance.
“The Born Loser” © Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc.
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CHAPTER 6 What Is Language?
For the most part, linguistic knowledge is unconscious knowledge. The linguistic system—the sounds, structures, meanings, words, and rules for putting
them all together—is acquired with no conscious awareness. Just as we may not
be conscious of the principles that allow us to stand or walk, we are unaware
of the rules of language. Our ability to speak, to understand, and to make judgments about the grammaticality of sentences reveals our knowledge of the rules
of our language. This knowledge represents a complex cognitive system. The
nature of this system is what this book is all about.
What Is Grammar?
We use the term “grammar” with a systematic ambiguity. On the one hand, the term refers
to the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the
speaker’s competence. On the other hand, it refers to this competence itself.
NOAM CHOMSKY AND MORRIS HALLE, The Sound Pattern of English, 1968
Descriptive Grammars
There are no primitive languages. The great and abstract ideas of Christianity can be
discussed even by the wretched Greenlanders.
JOHANN PETER SUESSMILCH, in a paper delivered before the Prussian Academy, 1756
The way we are using the word grammar differs from most common usages.
In our sense, the grammar is the knowledge speakers have about the units and
rules of their language—rules for combining sounds into words (called phonology), rules of word formation (called morphology), rules for combining words
into phrases and phrases into sentences (called syntax), as well as the rules for
assigning meaning (called semantics). The grammar, together with a mental dictionary (called a lexicon) that lists the words of the language, represents our linguistic competence. To understand the nature of language we must understand
the nature of grammar.
Every human being who speaks a language knows its grammar. When linguists wish to describe a language, they make explicit the rules of the grammar
of the language that exist in the minds of its speakers. There will be some differences among speakers, but there must be shared knowledge too. The shared
knowledge—the common parts of the grammar—makes it possible to communicate through language. To the extent that the linguist’s description is a true
model of the speakers’ linguistic capacity, it is a successful description of the
grammar and of the language itself. Such a model is called a descriptive grammar. It does not tell you how you should speak; it describes your basic linguistic
knowledge. It explains how it is possible for you to speak and understand and
make judgments about well-formedness, and it tells what you know about the
sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of your language.
When we say in later chapters that a sentence is grammatical we mean that
it conforms to the rules of the mental grammar (as described by the linguist);
What Is Grammar?
when we say that it is ungrammatical, we mean it deviates from the rules in
some way. If, however, we posit a rule for English that does not agree with your
intuitions as a speaker, then the grammar we are describing differs in some way
from the mental grammar that represents your linguistic competence; that is,
your language is not the one described. No language or variety of a language
(called a dialect) is superior to any other in a linguistic sense. Every grammar is
equally complex, logical, and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to
express any thought. If something can be expressed in one language or one dialect, it can be expressed in any other language or dialect. It might involve different means and different words, but it can be expressed. We will have more to say
about dialects in chapter 9. This is true as well for languages of technologically
underdeveloped cultures. The grammars of these languages are not primitive or
ill formed in any way. They have all the richness and complexity of the grammars of languages spoken in technologically advanced cultures.
Prescriptive Grammars
It is certainly the business of a grammarian to find out, and not to make, the laws of a
language.
JOHN FELL, Essay towards an English Grammar, 1784
Just read the sentence aloud, Amanda, and listen to how it sounds. If the sentence sounds
OK, go with it. If not, rearrange the pieces. Then throw out the rule books and go to bed.
JAMES KILPATRICK, “Writer’s Art” (syndicated newspaper column), 1998
Any fool can make a rule
And every fool will mind it
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, journal entry, 1860
Not all grammarians, past or present, share the view that all grammars are
equal. Language “purists” of all ages believe that some versions of a language
are better than others, that there are certain “correct” forms that all educated
people should use in speaking and writing, and that language change is corruption. The Greek Alexandrians in the first century, the Arabic scholars at Basra
in the eighth century, and numerous English grammarians of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries held this view. They wished to prescribe rather than
describe the rules of grammar, which gave rise to the writing of prescriptive
grammars.
In the Renaissance a new middle class emerged who wanted their children
to speak the dialect of the “upper” classes. This desire led to the publication of
many prescriptive grammars. In 1762 Bishop Robert Lowth wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes. Lowth prescribed a number
of new rules for English, many of them influenced by his personal taste. Before
the publication of his grammar, practically everyone—upper-class, middle-class,
and lower-class—said I don’t have none and You was wrong about that. Lowth,
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CHAPTER 6 What Is Language?
however, decided that “two negatives make a positive” and therefore one should
say I don’t have any; and that even when you is singular it should be followed by
the plural were. Many of these prescriptive rules were based on Latin grammar
and made little sense for English. Because Lowth was influential and because
the rising new class wanted to speak “properly,” many of these new rules were
legislated into English grammar, at least for the prestige dialect—that variety of
the language spoken by people in positions of power.
The view that dialects that regularly use double negatives are inferior cannot be justified if one looks at the standard dialects of other languages in the
world. Romance languages, for example, use double negatives, as the following
examples from French and Italian show:
French:
Je
I
ne veux
not want
Italian:
Non
not
voglio
I-want
parler
speak
avec
with
personne.
no-one.
parlare
speak
con
with
nessuno.
no-one.
English translation: “I don’t want to speak with anyone.”
Prescriptive grammars such as Lowth’s are different from the descriptive
grammars we have been discussing. Their goal is not to describe the rules people
know, but to tell them what rules they should follow. The great British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill is credited with this response to the “rule” against
ending a sentence with a preposition: “This is the sort of nonsense up with which
I will not put.”
Today our bookstores are populated with books by language purists attempting to “save the English language.” They criticize those who use enormity to
mean “enormous” instead of “monstrously evil.” But languages change in the
course of time and words change meaning. Language change is a natural process, as we discuss in chapter 10. Over time enormity was used more and more
in the media to mean “enormous,” and we predict that now that President
Barack Obama has used it that way (in his victory speech of November 4, 2008),
that usage will gain acceptance. Still, the “saviors” of the English language will
never disappear. They will continue to blame television, the schools, and even
the National Council of Teachers of English for failing to preserve the standard
language, and are likely to continue to dis (oops, we mean disparage) anyone
who suggests that African American English (AAE)4 and other dialects are viable, complete languages.
In truth, human languages are without exception fully expressive, complete,
and logical, as much as they were two hundred or two thousand years ago.
Hopefully (another frowned-upon usage), this book will convince you that all
languages and dialects are rule-governed, whether spoken by rich or poor, powerful or weak, learned or illiterate. Grammars and usages of particular groups
4AAE
is also called African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Ebonics, and Black
English (BE). It is spoken by some (but by no means all) African Americans. It is discussed in
chapter 9.
What Is Grammar?
in society may be dominant for social and political reasons, but from a linguistic
(scientific) perspective they are neither superior nor inferior to the grammars
and usages of less prestigious members of society.
Having said all this, it is undeniable that the standard dialect (defined in
chapter 9) may indeed be a better dialect for someone wishing to obtain a particular job or achieve a position of social prestige. In a society where “linguistic
profiling” is used to discriminate against speakers of a minority dialect, it may
behoove those speakers to learn the prestige dialect rather than wait for social
change. But linguistically, prestige and standard dialects do not have superior
grammars.
Finally, all of the preceding remarks apply to spoken language. Writing (see
chapter 11) is not acquired naturally through simple exposure to others speaking
the language (see chapter 7), but must be taught. Writing follows certain prescriptive rules of grammar, usage, and style that the spoken language does not,
and is subject to little, if any, dialectal variation.
Teaching Grammars
I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.
G. B. SHAW, Pygmalion, 1912
The descriptive grammar of a language attempts to describe the rules internalized by a speaker of that language. It is different from a teaching grammar,
which is used to learn another language or dialect. Teaching grammars can be
helpful to people who do not speak the standard or prestige dialect, but find it
would be advantageous socially and economically to do so. They are used in
schools in foreign language classes. This kind of grammar gives the words and
their pronunciations, and explicitly states the rules of the language, especially
where they differ from the language of instruction.
It is often difficult for adults to learn a second language without formal
instruction, even when they have lived for an extended period in a country where
the language is spoken. (Second language acquisition is discussed in more detail
in chapter 7.) Teaching grammars assume that the student already knows one
language and compares the grammar of the target language with the grammar
of the native language. The meaning of a word is provided by a gloss—the parallel word in the student’s native language, such as maison, “house” in French. It
is assumed that the student knows the meaning of the gloss “house,” and so also
the meaning of the word maison.
Sounds of the target language that do not occur in the native language are
often described by reference to known sounds. Thus the student might be aided
in producing the French sound u in the word tu by instructions such as “Round
your lips while producing the vowel sound in tea.”
The rules on how to put words together to form grammatical sentences also
refer to the learner’s knowledge of their native language. For example, the teaching grammar Learn Zulu by Sibusiso Nyembezi states that “The difference
between singular and plural is not at the end of the word but at the beginning
of it,” and warns that “Zulu does not have the indefinite and definite articles
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‘a’ and ‘the.’” Such statements assume students know the rules of their own
grammar, in this case English. Although such grammars might be considered
prescriptive in the sense that they attempt to teach the student what is or is not
a grammatical construction in the new language, their aim is different from
grammars that attempt to change the rules or usage of a language that is already
known by the speaker.
This book is not primarily concerned with either prescriptive or teaching
grammars. However, these kinds of grammars are considered in chapter 9 in the
discussion of standard and nonstandard dialects.
Language Universals
In a grammar there are parts that pertain to all languages; these components form what is
called the general grammar. In addition to these general (universal) parts, there are those
that belong only to one particular language; and these constitute the particular grammars
of each language.
CÉSAR CHESNEAU DU MARSAIS, c. 1750
There are rules of particular languages, such as English, Swahili, and Zulu, that
form part of the individual grammars of these languages, and then there are
rules that hold in all languages. Those rules representing the universal properties
that all languages share constitute a universal grammar. The linguist attempts
to uncover the “laws” of particular languages, and also the laws that pertain to
all languages. The universal laws are of particular interest because they give us a
window into the workings of the human mind in this cognitive domain.
In about 1630, the German philosopher Johann Heinrich Alsted first used
the term general grammar as distinct from special grammar. He believed that
the function of a general grammar was to reveal those features “which relate
to the method and etiology of grammatical concepts. They are common to all
languages.” Pointing out that “general grammar is the pattern ‘norma’ of every
particular grammar whatsoever,” he implored “eminent linguists to employ their
insight in this matter.” Three and a half centuries before Alsted, the scholar
Robert Kilwardby held that linguists should be concerned with discovering
the nature of language in general. So concerned was Kilwardby with Universal
Grammar that he excluded considerations of the characteristics of particular
languages, which he believed to be as “irrelevant to a science of grammar as the
material of the measuring rod or the physical characteristics of objects were to
geometry.” Kilwardby was perhaps too much of a universalist. The particular
properties of individual languages are relevant to the discovery of language universals, and they are of interest for their own sake.
People attempting to study Latin, Greek, French, or Swahili as a second language are so focused on learning those aspects of the second language that are
different from their native language that they may be skeptical of assertions
that there are universal laws of language. Yet the more we investigate this question, the more evidence accumulates to support Chomsky’s view that there is
a Universal Grammar (UG) that is part of the biologically endowed human
Language Universals
language faculty. We can think of UG as the basic blueprint that all languages
follow. It specifies the different components of the grammar and their relations,
how the different rules of these components are constructed, how they interact,
and so on. It is a major aim of linguistic theory to discover the nature of UG.
The linguist’s goal is to reveal the “laws of human language” as the physicist’s
goal is to reveal the “laws of the physical universe.” The complexity of language,
a product of the human brain, undoubtedly means this goal will never be fully
achieved. All scientific theories are incomplete, and new hypotheses must be
proposed to account for new data. Theories are continually changing as new discoveries are made. Just as physics was enlarged by Einstein’s theories of relativity, so grows the linguistic theory of UG as new discoveries shed new light on the
nature of human language. The comparative study of many different languages
is of central importance to this enterprise.
The Development of Grammar
How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal
and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?
BERTRAND RUSSELL, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948
Linguistic theory is concerned not only with describing the knowledge that an
adult speaker has of his or her language, but also with explaining how that
knowledge is acquired. All normal children acquire (at least one) language in
a relatively short period with apparent ease. They do this despite the fact that
parents and other caregivers do not provide them with any specific language
instruction. Indeed, it is often remarked that children seem to “pick up” language just from hearing it spoken around them. Children are language learning
virtuosos—whether a child is male or female, from a rich family or a disadvantaged one, grows up on a farm or in the city, attends day care or has home
care—none of these factors fundamentally affects the way language develops.
Children can acquire any language they are exposed to with comparable ease—
English, Dutch, French, Swahili, Japanese—and even though each of these languages has its own peculiar characteristics, children learn them all in very much
the same way. For example, all children go through a babbling stage; their babbles gradually give way to words, which then combine into simple sentences.
When children first begin to produce sentences, certain elements may be missing. For example, the English-speaking two-year-old might say Cathy build
house instead of Cathy is building the house. On the other side of the world, a
Swahili-speaking child will say mbuzi kula majani, which translates as “goat eat
grass,” and which also lacks many required elements. They pass through other
linguistic stages on their way to adultlike competence, and by about age five
children speak a language that is almost indistinguishable from the language of
the adults around them.
In just a few short years, without the benefit of explicit guidance and regardless of personal circumstances, the young child—who may be unable to tie her
shoes or do even the simplest arithmetic computation—masters the complex
grammatical structures of her language and acquires a substantial lexicon. Just
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how children accomplish this remarkable cognitive feat is a topic of intense interest to linguists. The child’s inexorable path to adult linguistic knowledge and the
uniformity of the acquisition process point to a substantial innate component to
language development. Chomsky, following the lead of the early rationalist philosophers, proposed that human beings are born with an innate “blueprint” for
language, what we referred to earlier as Universal Grammar. Children acquire
language as quickly and effortlessly as they do because they do not have to figure out all the grammatical rules, only those that are specific to their particular
language. The universal properties—the laws of language—are part of their biological endowment. Linguistic theory aims to uncover those principles that characterize all human languages and to reveal the innate component of language
that makes language acquisition possible. In chapter 7 we will discuss language
acquisition in more detail.
Sign Languages: Evidence
for the Innateness of Language
It is not the want of organs that [prevents animals from making] . . . known their
thoughts . . . for it is evident that magpies and parrots are able to utter words just like
ourselves, and yet they cannot speak as we do, that is, so as to give evidence that they
think of what they say. On the other hand, men who, being born deaf and mute . . . are
destitute of the organs which serve the others for talking, are in the habit of themselves
inventing certain signs by which they make themselves understood.
RENÉ DESCARTES, Discourse on Method, 1637
The sign languages of deaf communities provide some of the best evidence to
support the notion that humans are born with the ability to acquire language,
and that all languages are governed by the same universal properties.
Because deaf children are unable to hear speech, they do not acquire spoken
languages as hearing children do. However, deaf children who are exposed to
sign languages acquire them just as hearing children acquire spoken languages.
Sign languages do not use sounds to express meanings. Instead, they are visualgestural systems that use hand, body, and facial gestures as the forms used to
represent words and grammatical rules. Sign languages are fully developed languages, and signers create and comprehend unlimited numbers of new sentences,
just as speakers of spoken languages do. Current research on sign languages has
been crucial to understanding the biological underpinnings of human language
acquisition and use.
About one in a thousand babies is born deaf or with a severe hearing deficiency. Deaf children have difficulty learning a spoken language because normal
speech depends largely on auditory feedback. To learn to speak, a deaf child
requires extensive training in special schools or programs designed especially for
deaf people.
Although deaf people can be taught to speak a language intelligibly, they can
never understand speech as well as a hearing person. Seventy-five percent of
spoken English words cannot be read on the lips accurately. The ability of many
deaf individuals to comprehend spoken language is therefore remarkable; they
Language Universals
combine lip reading with knowledge of the structure of language, the meaning
redundancies that language has, and context.
If, however, human language is a biologically based ability and all human
beings have the innate ability (or as Darwin suggested, instinct) to acquire a
language, it is not surprising that nonspoken languages have developed among
nonhearing individuals. The more we learn about the human linguistic knowledge, the clearer it becomes that language acquisition and use are not dependent
on the ability to produce and hear sounds, but on a far more abstract cognitive
capacity that accounts for the similarities between spoken and sign languages.
American Sign Language
The major language of the deaf community in the United States is American
Sign Language (ASL). ASL is an outgrowth of the sign language used in France
and brought to the United States in 1817 by the great educator Thomas Hopkins
Gallaudet.
Like all languages, ASL has its own grammar with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules, and a mental lexicon of signs, all of which
is encoded through a system of gestures, and is otherwise equivalent to spoken
languages.
Signers communicate ideas at a rate comparable to spoken communication.
Moreover, language arts are not lost to the deaf community. Poetry is composed
in sign language, and stage plays such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic
have been translated into sign language and acted by the National Theatre of the
Deaf.
Deaf children acquire sign language much in the way that hearing children
acquire a spoken language, going through the same linguistic stages including
the babbling stage. Deaf children babble with their hands, just as hearing children babble with their vocal tract. Deaf children often sign themselves to sleep
just as hearing children talk themselves to sleep. Deaf children report that they
dream in sign language as French-speaking children dream in French and Hopispeaking children dream in Hopi. Deaf children sign to their dolls and stuffed
animals. Slips of the hand occur similar to slips of the tongue; finger fumblers
amuse signers as tongue twisters amuse speakers. Sign languages resemble spoken languages in all major aspects, showing that there truly are universals of
language despite differences in the modality in which the language is performed.
This universality is predictable because regardless of the modality in which it is
expressed, language is a biologically based ability.
In the United States there are several signing systems that educators have
created in an attempt to represent spoken and/or written English. Unlike ASL,
these languages are artificial, consisting essentially in the replacement of each
spoken English word (and grammatical elements such as the -s ending for plurals and the -ed ending for past tense) by a sign. So the syntax and semantics of
these manual codes for English are approximately the same as those of spoken
English. The result is unnatural—similar to trying to speak French by translating every English word or ending into its French counterpart. Difficulties arise
because there are not always corresponding forms in the two languages. The
problem is even greater with sign languages because they use multidimensional
space while spoken languages are sequential.
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FIGURE 6.2 | The ASL sign DECIDE: (a) and (c) show transitions from the sign;
(b) illustrates the single downward movement of the sign.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher from THE SIGNS OF LANGUAGE by Edward Klima and Ursula
Bellugi, p. 62, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1979 by the President and
Fellows of Harvard College.
There are occasions when signers need to represent a word or concept for
which there is no sign. New coinages, foreign words, acronyms, certain proper
nouns, technical vocabulary, or obsolete words as might be found in a signed
interpretation of a play by Shakespeare are among some of these. For such cases
ASL provides a series of hand shapes and movements that represent the letters
of the English alphabet, permitting all such words and concepts to be expressed
through finger spelling.
Signs, however, are produced differently from finger-spelled words. As Klima
and Bellugi observe, “The sign DECIDE cannot be analyzed as a sequence of
distinct, separable configurations of the hand. Like all other lexical signs in
ASL, but unlike the individual finger-spelled letters in D-E-C-I-D-E taken separately, the ASL sign DECIDE does have an essential movement but the hand
shape occurs simultaneously with the movement. In appearance, the sign is a
continuous whole.”5 This sign is shown in Figure 6.2.
Animal “Languages”
A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell
you that his parents were honest though poor.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948
Is language the exclusive property of the human species? The idea of talking animals is as old and as widespread among human societies as language itself. All
cultures have legends in which some animal plays a speaking role. All over West
Africa, children listen to folktales in which a “spider-man” is the hero. “Coyote”
is a favorite figure in many Native American tales, and many an animal takes
5 Klima,
E. S., and U. Bellugi. 1979. The signs of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Animal “Languages”
the stage in Aesop’s famous fables. The fictional Doctor Doolittle’s forte was
communicating with all manner of animals, from giant snails to tiny sparrows.
If language is viewed only as a system of communication, then many species
communicate. Humans also use systems other than language to relate to each
other and to send and receive “messages,” like so-called body language. The
question is whether the communication systems used by other species are at all
like human linguistic knowledge, which is acquired by children with no instruction, and which is used creatively rather than in response to internal or external
stimuli.
“Talking” Parrots
Words learned by rote a parrot may rehearse; but talking is not always to converse.
WILLIAM COWPER, Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq., 1782
“Bizarro” © by Dan Piraro. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate. All rights reserved.
Most humans who acquire language use speech sounds to express meanings, but
such sounds are not a necessary aspect of language, as evidenced by the sign languages. The use of speech sounds is therefore not a basic part of what we have
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been calling language. The chirping of birds, the squeaking of dolphins, and the
dancing of bees may potentially represent systems similar to human languages.
If animal communication systems are not like human language, it is not because
of a lack of speech.
Conversely, when animals vocally imitate human utterances, it does not mean
they possess language. Language is a system that relates sounds or gestures to
meanings. Talking birds such as parrots and mynahs are capable of faithfully
reproducing words and phrases of human language that they have heard, but
their utterances carry no meaning. They are speaking neither English nor their
own language when they sound like us.
Talking birds do not dissect the sounds of their imitations into discrete units.
Polly and Molly do not rhyme for a parrot. They are as different as hello and
good-bye. One property of all human languages (which will be discussed further in chapter 4) is the discreteness of the speech or gestural units, which are
ordered and reordered, combined and split apart. Generally, a parrot says what
it is taught, or what it hears, and no more. If Polly learns “Polly wants a cracker”
and “Polly wants a doughnut” and also learns to imitate the single words whiskey and bagel, she will not spontaneously produce, as children do, “Polly wants
whiskey” or “Polly wants a bagel” or “Polly wants whiskey and a bagel.” If she
learns cat and cats, and dog and dogs, and then learns the word parrot, she will
not be able to form the plural parrots as children do by the age of three; nor can
a parrot form an unlimited set of utterances from a finite set of units, or understand utterances never heard before. Reports of an African gray parrot named
Alex suggest that new methods of training animals may result in more learning
than was previously believed possible. When the trainer uses words in context,
Alex seems to relate some sounds with their meanings. This is more than simple imitation, but it is not how children acquire the complexities of the grammar of any language. It is more like a dog learning to associate certain sounds
with meanings, such as heel, sit, fetch, and so on. Indeed, a recent study in Germany reports on a nine-year-old border collie named Rico who has acquired a
200-word vocabulary (containing both German and English words). Rico did
not require intensive training but was able to learn many of these words quite
quickly.
However impressive these feats, the ability of a parrot to produce sounds
similar to those used in human language, even if meanings are related to these
sounds, and Rico’s ability to understand sequences of sounds that correspond to
specific objects, cannot be equated with the child’s ability to acquire the complex grammar of a human language.
The Birds and the Bees
The birds and animals are all friendly to each other, and there are no disputes about
anything. They all talk, and they all talk to me, but it must be a foreign language for I
cannot make out a word they say.
MARK TWAIN, Eve’s Diary, 1906
Animal “Languages”
Most animals possess some kind of “signaling” communication system. Among
certain species of spiders there is a complex system for courtship. The male spider, before he approaches his ladylove, goes through an elaborate series of gestures to inform her that he is indeed a spider and a suitable mate, and not a
crumb or a fly to be eaten. These gestures are invariant. One never finds a creative spider changing or adding to the courtship ritual of his species.
A similar kind of gestural language is found among the fiddler crabs. There
are forty species, and each uses its own claw-waving movement to signal to
another member of its “clan.” The timing, movement, and posture of the body
never change from one time to another or from one crab to another within the
particular variety. Whatever the signal means, it is fixed. Only one meaning can
be conveyed.
The imitative sounds of talking birds have little in common with human
language, but the natural calls and songs of many species of birds do have a
communicative function. They also resemble human languages in that there are
“regional dialects” within the same species, and as with humans, these dialects
are transmitted from parents to offspring. Indeed, researchers have noted that
dialect differences may be better preserved in songbirds than in humans because
there is no homogenization of regional accents due to radio or TV.
Birdcalls (consisting of one or more short notes) convey messages associated
with the immediate environment, such as danger, feeding, nesting, flocking, and
so on. Bird songs (more complex patterns of notes) are used to stake out territory and to attract mates. There is no evidence of any internal structure to these
songs, nor can they be segmented into independently meaningful parts as words
of human language can be. In a study of the territorial song of the European
robin, it was discovered that the rival robins paid attention only to the alternation between high-pitched and low-pitched notes, and which came first did not
matter. The message varies only to the extent of how strongly the robin feels
about his possession and to what extent he is prepared to defend it and start a
family in that territory. The different alternations therefore express intensity and
nothing more. The robin is creative in his ability to sing the same thing in many
ways, but not creative in his ability to use the same units of the system to express
many different messages with different meanings.
As we discussed in the introduction, some species of birds can only acquire
their song during a specific period of development. In this respect bird songs are
similar to human language, for which there is also a critical period for acquisition. Although this is an important aspect of both bird song and human language, birdcalls and songs are fundamentally different kinds of communicative
systems. The kinds of messages that birds can convey are limited, and messages
are stimulus controlled.
This distinction is also true of the system of communication used by honeybees. A forager bee is able to return to the hive and communicate to other bees
where a source of food is located. It does so by performing a dance on a wall of
the hive that reveals the location and quality of the food source. For one species
of Italian honeybee, the dancing behavior may assume one of three possible patterns: round (which indicates locations near the hive, within 20 feet or so); sickle
(which indicates locations at 20 to 60 feet from the hive); and tail-wagging (for
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distances that exceed 60 feet). The number of repetitions per minute of the basic
pattern in the tail-wagging dance indicates the precise distance; the slower the
repetition rate, the longer the distance.
The bees’ dance is an effective system of communication for bees. It is capable, in principle, of infinitely many different messages, like human language; but
unlike human language, the system is confined to a single subject—food source.
An experimenter who forced a bee to walk to the food source showed the inflexibility. When the bee returned to the hive, it indicated a distance twenty-five
times farther away than the food source actually was. The bee had no way of
communicating the special circumstances in its message. This absence of creativity makes the bee’s dance qualitatively different from human language.
In the seventeenth century, the philosopher and mathematician René Descartes pointed out that the communication systems of animals are qualitatively
different from the language used by humans:
It is a very remarkable fact that there are none so depraved and stupid,
without even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words
together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their
thoughts; while, on the other hand, there is no other animal, however
perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same.
Descartes goes on to state that one of the major differences between humans
and animals is that human use of language is not just a response to external,
or even internal, stimuli, as are the sounds and gestures of animals. He warns
against confusing human use of language with “natural movements which betray
passions and may be . . . manifested by animals.”
To hold that animals communicate by systems qualitatively different from
human language systems is not to claim human superiority. Humans are not
inferior to the one-celled amoeba because they cannot reproduce by splitting
in two; they are just different sexually. They are not inferior to hunting dogs,
whose sense of smell is far better than that of human animals. As we will discuss
in the next chapter, the human language ability is rooted in the human brain,
just as the communication systems of other species are determined by their biological structure. All the studies of animal communication systems, including
those of primates, provide evidence for Descartes’ distinction between other
animal communication systems and the linguistic creative ability possessed by
the human animal.
Can Chimps Learn Human Language?
It is a great baboon, but so much like man in most things. . . . I do believe it already
understands much English; and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs.
ENTRY IN SAMUEL PEPYS’S DIARY, 1661
In their natural habitat, chimpanzees, gorillas, and other nonhuman primates
communicate with each other through visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile
Animal “Languages”
signals. Many of these signals seem to have meanings associated with the animals’ immediate environment or emotional state. They can signal danger and
can communicate aggressiveness and subordination. However, the natural
sounds and gestures produced by all nonhuman primates are highly stereotyped
and limited in the type and number of messages they convey, consisting mainly
of emotional responses to particular situations. They have no way of expressing
the anger they felt yesterday or the anticipation of tomorrow.
Even though the natural communication systems of these animals are quite
limited, many people have been interested in the question of whether they have
the latent capacity to acquire complex linguistic systems similar to human language. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there were a number of studies designed to test whether nonhuman primates could learn human
language.
In early experiments researchers raised chimpanzees in their own homes
alongside their children, in order to recreate the natural environment in which
human children acquire language. The chimps were unable to vocalize words
despite the efforts of their caretakers, though they did achieve the ability to
understand a number of individual words.
One disadvantage suffered by primates is that their vocal tracts do not permit
them to pronounce many different sounds. Because of their manual dexterity,
primates might better be taught sign language as a test of their cognitive linguistic ability. Starting with a chimpanzee named Washoe, and continuing over
the years with a gorilla named Koko and another chimp ironically named Nim
Chimpsky (after Noam Chomsky), efforts were made to teach them American
Sign Language. Though the primates achieved small successes such as the ability
to string two signs together, and to occasionally show flashes of creativity, none
achieved the qualitative linguistic ability of a human child.
Similar results were obtained in attempting to teach primates artificial languages designed to resemble human languages in some respects. Sarah, Lana,
Sherman, Austin, and other chimpanzees were taught languages whose “words”
were plastic chips, or keys on a keyboard, that could be arranged into “sentences.” The researchers were particularly interested in the ability of primates to
communicate using such abstract symbols.
These experiments also came under scrutiny. Questions arose over what kind
of knowledge Sarah and Lana were showing with their symbol manipulations.
The conclusion was that the creative ability that is so much a part of human language was not evidenced by the chimps’ use of the artificial languages.
More recently, psychologists Patricia Greenfield and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
studied a different species of chimp, a male bonobo (or pygmy chimpanzee)
named Kanzi. They used the same plastic symbols and computer keyboard
that were used with Lana. They claimed that Kanzi not only learned, but also
invented, grammatical rules. One rule they described is the use of a symbol designating an object such as “dog” followed by a symbol meaning “go.” After
combining these symbols, Kanzi would then go to an area where dogs were
located to play with them. Greenfield and Savage-Rumbaugh claimed that this
“ordering” rule was not an imitation of his caretakers’ utterances, who they said
used an opposite ordering, in which “go” was followed by “dogs.”
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Kanzi’s acquisition of grammatical skills was slower than that of children,
taking about three years (starting when he was five and a half years old). Most
of Kanzi’s “sentences” are fixed formulas with little if any internal structure.
Kanzi has not yet exhibited the linguistic knowledge of a human three-year-old,
whose complexity level includes knowledge of sentence structure. Moreover,
unlike Kanzi’s use of a different word order from his caretakers, children rapidly
adopt the correct word order of the surrounding language.
As often happens in science, the search for the answers to one kind of question leads to answers to other questions. The linguistic experiments with primates have led to many advances in our understanding of primate cognitive ability. Researchers have gone on to investigate other capacities of the chimp mind,
such as causality; Savage-Rumbaugh and Greenfield are continuing to study the
ability of chimpanzees to use symbols. These studies also point out how remarkable it is that human children, by the ages of three and four, without explicit
teaching or overt reinforcement, create new and complex sentences never spoken
and never heard before.
In the Beginning:
The Origin of Language
Nothing, no doubt, would be more interesting than to know from historical documents
the exact process by which the first man began to lisp his first words, and thus to be rid
forever of all the theories on the origin of speech.
MAX MÜLLER, Lectures on the Science of Language, 1874
All religions and mythologies contain stories of language origin. Philosophers
through the ages have argued the question. Scholarly works have been written
on the subject. Prizes have been awarded for the “best answer” to this eternally
perplexing problem. Theories of divine origin, language as a human invention,
and evolutionary development have all been put forward.
Linguistic history suggests that spoken languages of the kind that exist
today have been around for tens of thousands of years at the very least, but
the earliest deciphered written records are barely six thousand years old. (The
origin of writing is discussed in chapter 11.) These records appear so late in
the history of the development of language that they provide no clue to its
origin.
Despite the difficulty of finding scientific evidence, speculations on language
origin have provided valuable insights into the nature and development of language, which prompted the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen to state that
“linguistic science cannot refrain forever from asking about the whence (and
about the whither) of linguistic evolution.” A brief look at some of these speculative notions will reveal this point.
In the Beginning: The Origin of Language
Divine Gift
And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the
air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam
called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
GENESIS 2:19, The Bible, King James Version
According to Judeo-Christian beliefs, the one deity gave Adam the power to
name all things. Similar beliefs are found throughout the world. According to
the Egyptians, the creator of speech was the god Thoth. Babylonians believed
that the language giver was the god Nabu, and the Hindus attributed our unique
language ability to a female god: Brahma was the creator of the universe, but his
wife Sarasvati gave language to us. Plato held that at some ancient time, a “legislator” gave the correct, natural name to everything, and that words echoed the
essence of their meanings.
Belief in the divine origin of language is intertwined with the supernatural
properties that have been associated with the spoken word. In many religions
only special languages may be used in prayers and rituals, such as Latin in the
Catholic Church for many centuries. The Hindu priests of the fifth century
b.c.e. believed that the original pronunciation of Vedic Sanskrit was sacred and
must be preserved. This led to important linguistic study because their language
had already changed greatly since the hymns of the Vedas had been written. The
first linguist known to us is Panini, who wrote a descriptive grammar of Sanskrit in the fourth century b.c.e. that revealed the earlier pronunciation, which
could then be used in religious worship. Even today Panini’s deep insights into
the workings of language are highly revered by linguists.
Although myths, customs, and superstitions do not tell us very much about
language origin, they do tell us about the importance ascribed to language.
There is no way to prove or disprove the divine origin of language, just as one
cannot argue scientifically for or against the existence of deities.
The First Language
Imagine the Lord talking French! Aside from a few odd words in Hebrew, I took it
completely for granted that God had never spoken anything but the most dignified English.
CLARENCE DAY, Life with Father, 1935
For millennia, “scientific” experiments have reportedly been devised to verify
particular theories of the first language. The Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus
(664–610 b.c.e.) sought to determine the most primitive language by isolating
two infants in a mountain hut, to be cared for by a mute servant, in the belief
that their first words would be in the original language. They weren’t! History is
replete with similar stories, but as we saw in the introduction, all such “experimentation” on children is unspeakably cruel and utterly worthless.
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Nearly all “theories” of language origin, however silly and superstitious, contain the implicit belief that all languages originated from a single source—the
monogenetic theory of language origin. Opposing this is the proposition that
language arose in several places, or at several times, in the course of history.
Which of these is true is still debated by linguists.
Human Invention or the Cries of Nature?
Language was born in the courting days of mankind; the first utterances of speech I fancy
to myself like something between the nightly love lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the
melodious love songs of the nightingale.
OTTO JESPERSEN, Language, Its Nature, Development, and Origin, 1922
Despite all evidence to the contrary, the idea that the earliest form of language
was imitative, or echoic, was proposed up to the twentieth century. A parallel
view states that language at first consisted of emotional ejaculations of pain, fear,
surprise, pleasure, anger, and so on. French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau
proposed that the earliest manifestations of language were “cries of nature.”
Other hypotheses suggested that language arose out of the rhythmical grunts
of men and women working together, or more charming, that language originated from song as an expressive rather than a communicative need. Just as with
the beliefs in a divine origin of language, these proposed origins are not verifiable by scientific means.
Language most likely evolved with the human species, possibly in stages, possibly in one giant leap. Research by linguists, evolutionary biologists, and neurologists support this view and the view that from the outset the human animal
was genetically equipped to learn language. Further discussion of this topic can
be found in the introduction.
Language and Thought
It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak
forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc—
should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.
GEORGE ORWELL, appendix to 1984, 1949
Many people are fascinated by the question of how language relates to thought.
It is natural to imagine that something as powerful and fundamental to human
nature as language would influence how we think about or perceive the world
around us. This is clearly reflected in the appendix of George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984, quoted above. Over the years there have been many claims made
regarding the relationship between language and thought. The claim that the
structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive the world around
Language and Thought
them is most closely associated with the linguist Edward Sapir and his student
Benjamin Whorf, and is therefore referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In
1929 Sapir wrote:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor in the world of
social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of
the particular language which has become the medium of expression for
their society . . . we see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as
we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain
choices of interpretation.6
Whorf made even stronger claims:
The background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of
each language is not merely the reproducing instrument for voicing
ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for
the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his
synthesis of his mental stock in trade . . . We dissect nature along lines
laid down by our native languages.7
The strongest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is called linguistic determinism because it holds that the language we speak determines how we perceive
and think about the world. On this view language acts like a filter on reality.
One of Whorf’s best-known claims in support of linguistic determinism was that
the Hopi Indians do not perceive time in the same way as speakers of European
languages because the Hopi language does not make the grammatical distinctions of tense that, for example, English does with words and word endings such
as did, will, shall, -s, -ed, and -ing.
A weaker form of the hypothesis is linguistic relativism, which says that different languages encode different categories and that speakers of different languages therefore think about the world in different ways. For example, languages
break up the color spectrum at different points. In Navaho, blue and green are
one word. Russian has different words for dark blue (siniy) and light blue (goluboy), while in English we need to use the additional words dark and light to
express the difference. The American Indian language Zuni does not distinguish
between the colors yellow and orange. Languages also differ in how they express
locations. For example, in Italian you ride “in” a bicycle and you go “in” a
country while in English you ride “on” a bicycle and you go “to” a country. In
English we say that a ring is placed “on” a finger and a finger is placed “in” the
ring. Korean, on the other hand, has one word for both situations, kitta, which
expresses the idea of a tight-fitting relation between the two objects. Spanish
has two different words for the inside of a corner (esquina) and the outside of
a corner (rincon). The Whorfian claim that is perhaps most familiar is that the
6Sapir,
E. 1929. Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, p. 207.
7 Whorf,
B. L., and J. B. Carroll. 1956. Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Eskimo language Inuit has many more words than English for snow and that
this affects the world view of the Inuit people.
“Family Circus” © 1999 Bil Keane, Inc. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
That languages show linguistic distinctions in their lexicons and grammar is
certain, and we will see many examples of this in later chapters. The question is
to what extent—if at all—such distinctions determine or influence the thoughts
and perceptions of speakers. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is controversial, but
it is clear that the strong form of this hypothesis is false. Peoples’ thoughts and
perceptions are not determined by the words and structures of their language.
We are not prisoners of our linguistic systems. If speakers were unable to think
about something for which their language had no specific word, translations
would be impossible, as would learning a second language. English may not
have a special word for the inside of a corner as opposed to the outside of a
corner, but we are perfectly able to express these concepts using more than one
word. In fact, we just did. If we could not think about something for which we
do not have words, how would infants ever learn their first word, much less a
language?
Many of the specific claims of linguistic determinism have been shown to be
wrong. For example, the Hopi language may not have words and word endings
Language and Thought
for specific tenses, but the language has other expressions for time, including
words for the days of the week, parts of the day, yesterday and tomorrow, lunar
phases, seasons, etc. The Hopi people use various kinds of calendars and various
devices for time-keeping based on the sundial. Clearly, they have a sophisticated
concept of time despite the lack of a tense system in the language. The Munduruku, an indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon, have no words in their
language for triangle, square, rectangle, or other geometric concepts, except circle. The only terms to indicate direction are words for upstream, downstream,
sunrise, and sunset. Yet Munduruku children understand many principles of
geometry as well as American children, whose language is rich in geometric and
spatial words.
Similarly, though languages differ in their color words, speakers can readily
perceive colors that are not named in their language. Grand Valley Dani is a language spoken in New Guinea with only two color words, black and white (dark
and light). In experimental studies, however, speakers of the language showed
recognition of the color red, and they did better with fire-engine red than offred. This would not be possible if their color perceptions were fixed by their
language. Our perception of color is determined by the structure of the human
eye, not by the structure of language. A source of dazzling linguistic creativity is
to be found at the local paint store where literally thousands of colors are given
names like soft pumpkin, Durango dust, and lavender lipstick.
Anthropologists have shown that Inuit has no more words for snow than
English does: around a dozen, including sleet, blizzard, slush, and flurry. But
even if it did, this would not show that language conditions the Inuits’ experience of the world, but rather that experience with a particular world creates the
need for certain words. In this respect the Inuit speaker is no different from the
computer programmer, who has a technical vocabulary for Internet protocols, or
the linguist, who has many specialized words regarding language. In this book
we will introduce you to many new words and linguistic concepts, and surely
you will learn them! This would be impossible if your thoughts about language
were determined by the linguistic vocabulary you now have.
These studies show that our perceptions and thoughts are not determined by
the words or word endings of our language. But what about the linguistic structures we are accustomed to using? Could these be a strong determinant? In a
recent study, psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues asked whether
the word order of a particular language influences the way its speakers describe
an event nonverbally, either with gestures or with pictures. Languages differ in
how they encode events, such as a person twisting a knob. Speakers of languages
like English, Chinese, and Spanish typically use the word order actor—action—
object (person—twist—knob), whereas speakers of languages like Turkish and
Japanese use the order actor—object—action (person—knob—twist). Word
order is one of the earliest aspects of language structure that children acquire
and it is a fundamental aspect of our linguistic knowledge. Therefore if language
structure strongly influences how we interpret events, then these ordering patterns might show up in the way we describe events even when we are not talking.
Goldin-Meadow and colleagues asked adult speakers of English, Turkish, and
Chinese (Mandarin) to describe vignettes shown on a computer screen using
only their hands, and also using a set of pictures. Their results showed that all
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the speakers—irrespective of their language—used the same order in the nonverbal tasks. The predominant gesture order was actor—action—object, and
the same results were found in the picture-ordering task. Goldin-Meadow and
colleagues suggest that there is a universal, natural order in which people cognitively represent events, and that this is not affected by the language they happen
to speak.
Similar results have been observed between English and Greek speakers. These
languages differ in how their verbs encode motion. When describing movement,
English speakers will commonly use verbs that focus on the manner of motion
such as slide, skip, and walk. Greek speakers, on the other hand, use verbs that
focus on the direction of the motion, as in approach and ascend. Measurements
of eye movements of these speakers as they verbally describe an event show that
they focus on the aspect of the event encoded by their language. However, when
freely observing an event but not describing it verbally, they attend to the event
in the same ways regardless of what language they speak. These results show
that speakers’ attention to events is not affected by their language except as they
are preparing to speak.
In our understanding of the world we are certainly not “at the mercy of whatever language we speak,” as Sapir suggested. However, we may ask whether the
language we speak influences our cognition in some way. In the domain of color
categorization, for example, it has been shown that if a language lacks a word
for red, say, then it’s harder for speakers to reidentify red objects. In other words,
having a label seems to make it easier to store or access information in memory.
Similarly, experiments show that Russian speakers are better at discriminating
light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy) objects than English speakers, whose
language does not make a lexical distinction between these categories. These
results show that words can influence simple perceptual tasks in the domain
of color discrimination. Upon reflection, this may not be a surprising finding.
Colors exist on a continuum, and the way we segment into “different” colors
happens at arbitrary points along this spectrum. Because there is no physical
motivation for these divisions, this may be the kind of situation where language
could show an effect.
The question has also been raised regarding the possible influence of grammatical gender on how people think about objects. Many languages, such as
Spanish and German, classify nouns as masculine or feminine; Spanish “key”
is la llave (feminine) and “bridge” is el puente (masculine). Some psychologists
have suggested that speakers of gender-marking languages think about objects
as having gender, much like people or animals have. In one study, speakers of
German and Spanish were asked to describe various objects using English adjectives (the speakers were proficient in English). In general, they used more masculine adjectives—independently rated as such—to describe objects that are grammatically masculine in their language. For example, Spanish speakers described
bridges (el puente) as big, dangerous, long, strong, and sturdy. In German the
word for bridge is feminine (die Brücke) and German speakers used more feminine adjectives such as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender.
Interestingly, it has been noted that English speakers, too, make consistent judgments about the gender of objects (ships are “she”) even though English has no
grammatical gender on common nouns. It may be, then, that regardless of the
What We Know about Human Language
language spoken, humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize objects and this
tendency is somehow enhanced if the language itself has grammatical gender.
Though it is too early to come to any firm conclusions, the results of these and
similar studies seem to support a weak version of linguistic relativism.
Politicians and marketers certainly believe that language can influence our
thoughts and values. One political party may refer to an inheritance tax as the
“estate tax,” while an opposing party refers to it as the “death tax.” One politician may refer to “tax breaks for the wealthy” while another refers to “tax
relief.” In the abortion debate, some refer to the “right to choose” and others to
the “right to life.” The terminology reflects different ideologies, but the choice of
expression is primarily intended to sway public opinion. Politically correct (PC)
language also reflects the idea that language can influence thought. Many people
believe that by changing the way we talk, we can change the way we think; that
if we eliminate racist and sexist terms from our language, we will become a less
racist and sexist society. As we will discuss in chapter 9, language itself is not
sexist or racist, but people can be, and because of this particular words take on
negative meanings. In his book The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker uses the
expression euphemism treadmill to describe how the euphemistic terms that are
created to replace negative words often take on the negative associations of the
words they were coined to replace. For example, handicapped was once a euphemism for the offensive term crippled, and when handicapped became politically
incorrect it was replaced by the euphemism disabled. And as we write, disabled
is falling into disrepute and is often replaced by yet another euphemism, challenged. Nonetheless, in all such cases, changing language has not resulted in a
new world view of the speakers.
Prescient as Orwell was with respect to how language could be used for social
control, he was more circumspect with regard to the relation between language
and thought. He was careful to qualify his notions with the phrase “at least so
far as thought is dependent on words.” Current research shows that language
does not determine how we think about and perceive the world. Future research
should show the extent to which language influences other aspects of cognition
such as memory and categorization.
What We Know about
Human Language
Much is unknown about the nature of human languages, their grammars and
use. The science of linguistics is concerned with these questions. Investigations
of linguists and the analyses of spoken languages date back at least to 1600
b.c.e. in Mesopotamia. We have learned a great deal since that time. A number
of facts pertaining to all languages can be stated.
1. Wherever humans exist, language exists.
2. There are no “primitive” languages—all languages are equally complex
and equally capable of expressing any idea. The vocabulary of any language can be expanded to include new words for new concepts.
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3. All languages change through time.
4. The relationships between the sounds and meanings of spoken languages
and between the gestures and meanings of sign languages are for the most
part arbitrary.
5. All human languages use a finite set of discrete sounds or gestures that are
combined to form meaningful elements or words, which themselves may be
combined to form an infinite set of possible sentences.
6. All grammars contain rules of a similar kind for the formation of words
and sentences.
7. Every spoken language includes discrete sound segments, like p, n, or a,
that can all be defined by a finite set of sound properties or features. Every
spoken language has both vowel sounds and consonant sounds.
8. Similar grammatical categories (for example, noun, verb) are found in all
languages.
9. There are universal semantic properties like entailment (one sentence inferring the truth of another) found in every language in the world.
10. Every language has a way of negating, forming questions, issuing commands, referring to past or future time, and so on.
11. All languages permit abstractions like goodness, spherical, and skillful.
12. All languages have slang, epithets, taboo words, and euphemisms for them,
such as john for “toilet.”
13. All languages have hypothetical, counterfactual, conditional, unreal, and
fictional utterances; e.g., “If I won the lottery, I would buy a Ferrari,” or
“Harry Potter battled Voldemort with his wand by Hogwarts castle.”
14. All languages exhibit freedom from stimulus; a person can choose to say
anything at any time under any circumstances, or can choose to say nothing at all.
15. Speakers of all languages are capable of producing and comprehending an
infinite set of sentences. Syntactic universals reveal that every language has
a way of forming sentences such as:
Linguistics is an interesting subject.
I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.
You know that I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.
Cecelia knows that you know that I know that linguistics is an interesting
subject.
Is it a fact that Cecelia knows that you know that I know that linguistics
is an interesting subject?
16. The ability of human beings to acquire, know, and use language is a biologically based ability rooted in the structure of the human brain, and
expressed in different modalities (spoken or signed).
17. Any normal child, born anywhere in the world, of any racial, geographical,
social, or economic heritage, is capable of learning any language to which
he or she is exposed. The differences among languages are not due to biological reasons.
It seems that the universalists from all ages were not spinning idle thoughts.
We all possess human language.
Summary
Summary
We are all intimately familiar with at least one language, our own. Yet few of us
ever stop to consider what we know when we know a language. No book contains, or could possibly contain, the English or Russian or Zulu language. The
words of a language can be listed in a dictionary, but not all the sentences can be;
and a language consists of these sentences as well as words. Speakers use a finite
set of rules to produce and understand an infinite set of possible sentences.
These rules are part of the grammar of a language, which develops when you
acquire the language and includes the sound system (the phonology), the structure and properties of words (the morphology and lexicon), how words may be
combined into phrases and sentences (the syntax), and the ways in which sounds
and meanings are related (the semantics). The sounds and meanings of individual words are related in an arbitrary fashion. If you had never heard the word
syntax you would not know what it meant by its sounds. The gestures used by
signers are also arbitrarily related to their meanings. Language, then, is a system
that relates sounds (or hand and body gestures) with meanings. When you know
a language, you know this system.
This knowledge (linguistic competence) is different from behavior (linguistic
performance). If you woke up one morning and decided to stop talking (as the
Trappist monks did after they took a vow of silence), you would still have knowledge of your language. This ability or competence underlies linguistic behavior.
If you do not know the language, you cannot speak it; but if you know the language, you may choose not to speak.
There are different kinds of “grammars.” The descriptive grammar of a language represents the unconscious linguistic knowledge or capacity of its speakers. Such a grammar is a model of the mental grammar every speaker of the
language knows. It does not teach the rules of the language; it describes the
rules that are already known. A grammar that attempts to legislate what your
grammar should be is called a prescriptive grammar. It prescribes. It does not
describe, except incidentally. Teaching grammars are written to help people
learn a foreign language or a dialect of their own language.
The more that linguists investigate the thousands of languages of the world
and describe the ways in which they differ from each other, the more they discover that these differences are limited. There are linguistic universals that pertain to each of the parts of grammars, the ways in which these parts are related,
and the forms of rules. These principles compose Universal Grammar, which
provides a blueprint for the grammars of all possible human languages. Universal Grammar constitutes the innate component of the human language faculty
that makes normal language development possible.
Strong evidence for Universal Grammar is found in the way children acquire
language. Children learn language by exposure. They need not be deliberately
taught, though parents may enjoy “teaching” their children to speak or sign.
Children will learn any human language to which they are exposed, and they
learn it in definable stages, beginning at a very early age. By four or five years of
age, children have acquired nearly the entire adult grammar. This suggests that
children are born with a genetically endowed faculty to learn and use human
language, which is part of the Universal Grammar.
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The fact that deaf children learn sign language shows that the ability to hear
or produce sounds is not a prerequisite for language learning. All the sign languages in the world, which differ as spoken languages do, are visual-gestural
systems that are as fully developed and as structurally complex as spoken languages. The major sign language used in the United States is American Sign
Language (ASL).
If language is defined merely as a system of communication, or the ability
to produce speech sounds, then language is not unique to humans. There are,
however, certain characteristics of human language not found in the communication systems of any other species. A basic property of human language is its
creativity—a speaker’s ability to combine the basic linguistic units to form an
infinite set of “well-formed” grammatical sentences, most of which are novel,
never before produced or heard.
For many years researchers were interested in the question of whether language is unique to the human species. There have been many attempts to teach
nonhuman primates communication systems that are supposed to resemble
human language in certain respects. Overall, results have been disappointing:
Chimpanzees like Sarah and Lana learned to manipulate symbols for rewards,
and others, like Washoe and Nim Chimpsky, learned a number of ASL signs.
But a careful examination of their multisign utterances reveals that unlike in
children, the language of the chimps shows little spontaneity, is highly imitative
(echoic), and has little syntactic structure. It has been suggested that the pygmy
chimp Kanzi shows grammatical ability greater than the other chimps studied,
but he still does not have the ability of even a three-year-old child.
At present we do not know if there was a single original language—the monogenetic hypothesis—or whether language arose independently in several places,
or at several times, in human history. Myths of language origin abound; divine
origin and various modes of human invention are the source of these myths.
Language most likely evolved with the human species, possibly in stages, possibly in one giant leap.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that the particular language we speak
determines or influences our thoughts and perceptions of the world. Much of
the early evidence in support of this hypothesis has not stood the test of time.
More recent experimental studies suggest that the words and grammar of a language may affect aspects of cognition, such as memory and categorization.
References for Further Reading
Anderson, S. R. 2008. The logical structure of linguistic theory. Language (December):
795–814.
Bickerton, D. 1990. Language and species. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Chomsky, N. 1986. Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. New York and
London: Praeger.
______. 1975. Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon Books.
______. 1972. Language and mind. Enlarged ed. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
Gentner, D., and S. Goldin-Meadow. 2003. Language in mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Exercises
Hall, R. A. 1950. Leave your language alone. Ithaca, NY: Linguistica.
Jackendoff, R. 1997. The architecture of the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
______. 1994. Patterns in the mind: Language and human nature. New York: Basic
Books.
Klima, E. S., and U. Bellugi. 1979. The signs of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Lane, H. 1989. When the mind hears: A history of the deaf. New York: Vintage Books
(Random House).
Milroy, J., and L. Milroy. 1998. Authority in language: Investigating standard English,
3rd edn. New York: Routledge.
Napoli, D. J. 2003. Language matters: A guide to everyday thinking about language.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Pinker, S. 1999. Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York:
HarperCollins.
______. 1994. The language instinct. New York: William Morrow.
Premack, A. J., and D. Premack. 1972. Teaching language to an ape. Scientific American (October): 92–99.
Terrace, H. S. 1979. Nim: A chimpanzee who learned sign language. New York: Knopf.
Stam, J. 1976. Inquiries into the origin of language: The fate of a question. New York:
Harper & Row.
Stokoe, W. 1960. Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication system of the American deaf. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press.
Exercises
1. An English speaker’s knowledge includes the sound sequences of the language. When new products are put on the market, the manufacturers have
to think up new names for them that conform to the allowable sound patterns. Suppose you were hired by a manufacturer of soap products to name
five new products. What names might you come up with? List them.
We are interested in how the names are pronounced. Therefore,
describe in any way you can how to say the words you list. Suppose, for
example, you named one detergent Blick. You could describe the sounds in
any of the following ways:
bl as in blood, i as in pit, ck as in stick
bli as in bliss, ck as in tick
b as in boy, lick as in lick
2. Consider the following sentences. Put a star (*) after those that do not seem
to conform to the rules of your grammar, that are ungrammatical for you.
State, if you can, why you think the sentence is ungrammatical.
a. Robin forced the sheriff go.
b. Napoleon forced Josephine to go.
c. The devil made Faust go.
d. He passed by a large pile of money.
e. He came by a large sum of money.
f. He came a large sum of money by.
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g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
m.
n.
o.
p.
q.
r.
s.
Did in a corner little Jack Horner sit?
Elizabeth is resembled by Charles.
Nancy is eager to please.
It is easy to frighten Emily.
It is eager to love a kitten.
That birds can fly amazes.
The fact that you are late to class is surprising.
Has the nurse slept the baby yet?
I was surprised for you to get married.
I wonder who and Mary went swimming.
Myself bit John.
What did Alice eat the toadstool with?
What did Alice eat the toadstool and?
3. It was pointed out in this chapter that a small set of words in languages
may be onomatopoeic; that is, their sounds “imitate” what they refer
to. Ding-dong, tick-tock, bang, zing, swish, and plop are such words in
English. Construct a list of ten new onomatopoeic words. Test them on
at least five friends to see if they are truly nonarbitrary as to sound and
meaning.
4. Although sounds and meanings of most words in all languages are arbitrarily related, there are some communication systems in which the “signs”
unambiguously reveal their “meaning.”
a. Describe (or draw) five different signs that directly show what they
mean. Example: a road sign indicating an S curve.
b. Describe any other communication system that, like language, consists
of arbitrary symbols. Example: traffic signals, where red means stop
and green means go.
5. Consider these two statements: I learned a new word today. I learned a new
sentence today. Do you think the two statements are equally probable, and
if not, why not?
6. What do the barking of dogs, the meowing of cats, and the singing of
birds have in common with human language? What are some of the basic
differences?
7. A wolf is able to express subtle gradations of emotion by different positions
of the ears, the lips, and the tail. There are eleven postures of the tail that
express such emotions as self-confidence, confident threat, lack of tension, uncertain threat, depression, defensiveness, active submission, and
complete submission. This system seems to be complex. Suppose that there
were a thousand different emotions that the wolf could express in this way.
Would you then say a wolf had a language similar to a human’s? If not,
why not?
8. Suppose you taught a dog to heel, sit up, roll over, play dead, stay, jump,
and bark on command, using the italicized words as cues. Would you be
teaching it language? Why or why not?
Exercises
9. State some rule of grammar that you have learned is the correct way to say
something, but that you do not generally use in speaking. For example, you
may have heard that It’s me is incorrect and that the correct form is It’s I.
Nevertheless, you always use me in such sentences; your friends do also,
and in fact It’s I sounds odd to you.
Write a short essay presenting arguments against someone who tells you
that you are wrong. Discuss how this disagreement demonstrates the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammars.
10. Noam Chomsky has been quoted as saying:
It’s about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as that
there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for
human beings to teach them to fly.
In the light of evidence presented in this chapter, comment on Chomsky’s remark. Do you agree or disagree, or do you think the evidence is
inconclusive?
11. Think of song titles that are “bad” grammar, but that, if corrected, would
lack effect. For example, the 1929 “Fats” Waller classic “Ain’t Misbehavin’” is clearly superior to the bland “I am not misbehaving.” Try to
come up with five or ten such titles.
12. Linguists who attempt to write a descriptive grammar of linguistic competence are faced with a difficult task. They must understand a deep and
complex system based on a set of sparse and often inaccurate data. (Children learning language face the same difficulty.) Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld captured the essence of the difficulty in their book The Evolution of Physics, written in 1938:
In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying
to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the
moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the
case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which
could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be
quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a
comparison.
Write a short essay that speculates on how a linguist might go about
understanding the reality of a person’s grammar (the closed watch) by
observing what that person says and doesn’t say (the face and moving
hands). For example, a person might never say the sixth sheik’s sixth sheep
is sick as a dog, but the grammar should specify that it is a well-formed
sentence, just as it should somehow indicate that Came the messenger on
time is ill-formed.
13. View the motion picture My Fair Lady (drawn from the play Pygmalion by
George Bernard Shaw). Write down every attempt to teach grammar (pro-
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CHAPTER 6 What Is Language?
nunciation, word choice, and syntax) to the character of Eliza Doolittle.
This is an illustration of a “teaching grammar.”
14. Many people are bilingual or multilingual, speaking two or more languages with very different structures.
a. What implications does bilingualism have for the debate about language and thought?
b. Many readers of this textbook have some knowledge of a second language. Think of a linguistic structure or word in one language that
does not exist in the second language and discuss how this does or does
not affect your thinking when you speak the two languages. (If you
know only one language, ask this question of a bilingual person you
know.)
c. Can you find an example of an untranslatable word or structure in one
of the languages you speak?
15. The South American indigenous language Pirahã is said to lack numbers
beyond two and distinct words for colors. Research this language—Google
would be a good start—with regard to whether Pirahã supports or fails to
support linguistic determinism and/or linguistic relativism.
16. English (especially British English) has many words for woods and woodlands. Here are some:
woodlot, carr, fen, firth, grove, heath, holt, lea, moor, shaw, weald, wold,
coppice, scrub, spinney, copse, brush, bush, bosquet, bosky, stand, forest,
timberland, thicket
a. How many of these words do you recognize?
b. Look up several of these words in the dictionary and discuss the differences in meaning. Many of these words are obsolete, so if your dictionary doesn’t have them, try the Internet.
c. Do you think that English speakers have a richer concept of woodlands
than speakers whose language has fewer words? Why or why not?
17. English words containing dge in their spelling (trudge, edgy) are said
mostly to have an unfavorable or negative connotation. Research this
notion by accumulating as many dge words as you can and classifying them
as unfavorable (sludge) or neutral (bridge). What do you do about budget?
Unfavorable or not? Are there other questionable words?
18. With regard to the “euphemism treadmill”: Identify three other situations
in which a euphemism evolved to be as offensive as the word it replaced,
requiring yet another euphemism. Hint: Sex, race, and bodily functions are
good places to start.
19. Research project: Read the Cratylus Dialogue—it’s online. In it is a discussion (or “dialogue”) of whether names are “conventional” (i.e., what we
have called arbitrary) or “natural.” Do you find Socrates’ point of view
sufficiently well argued to support the thesis in this chapter that the rela-
Exercises
tionship between form and meaning is indeed arbitrary? Argue your case in
either direction in a short (or long, if you wish) essay.
20. Research project: (Cf. exercise 15) It is claimed that Pirahã—an indigenous
language of Brazil—violates some of the universal principles hypothesized
by linguists. Which principles are in question? Is the evidence persuasive?
Conclusive? Speculative? (Hint: Use the journal Language, Volume 85,
Number 2, June 2009.)
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7
Language Acquisition
[The acquisition of language] is doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is
ever required to perform.
LEONARD BLOOMFIELD, Language, 1933
The capacity to learn language is deeply ingrained in us as a species, just as the capacity to
walk, to grasp objects, to recognize faces. We don’t find any serious differences in children
growing up in congested urban slums, in isolated mountain villages, or in privileged
suburban villas.
DAN SLOBIN, The Human Language Series program 2, 1994
324
Language is extremely complex. Yet very young children—before the age of
five—already know most of the intricate system that is the grammar of a language. Before they can add 2 + 2, children are conjoining sentences, asking questions, using appropriate pronouns, negating sentences, forming relative clauses,
and inflecting verbs and nouns and in general have the creative capacity to produce and understand a limitless number of sentences.
It is obvious that children do not learn a language simply by memorizing
the sentences of the language. Rather, they acquire a system of grammatical
rules of the sort we have discussed in the preceding chapters. No one teaches
children the rules of the grammar. Their parents are no more aware of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules than are the children.
Even if you remember your early years, do you remember anyone telling you to
form a sentence by adding a verb phrase to a noun phrase, or to add [s] or [z]
to form plurals? No one told you “This is a grammatical utterance and that is
not.” Yet somehow you were able, as all children are, to quickly and effortlessly
extract the intricate system of rules from the language you heard around you
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
and thereby “reinvent” the grammar of your parents. How the child accomplishes this phenomenal task is the subject of this chapter.
Mechanisms of
Language Acquisition
There have been various proposals concerning the psychological mechanisms
involved in acquiring a language. Early theories of language acquisition were
heavily influenced by behaviorism, a school of psychology prevalent in the
1950s. As the name implies, behaviorism focused on people’s behaviors, which
are directly observable, rather than on the mental systems underlying these
behaviors. Language was viewed as a kind of verbal behavior, and it was proposed that children learn language through imitation, reinforcement, analogy,
and similar processes. B. F. Skinner, one of the founders of behaviorist psychology, proposed a model of language acquisition in his book Verbal Behavior
(1957). Two years later, in a devastating reply to Skinner entitled Review of
Verbal Behavior (1959), Noam Chomsky showed that language is a complex
cognitive system that could not be acquired by behaviorist principles.
Do Children Learn through Imitation?
Child:
Adult:
Child:
Adult:
Child:
Adult:
Child:
My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?
Yes.
What did you say she did?
She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Did you say she held them tightly?
No, she holded them loosely.
ANONYMOUS ADULT AND CHILD
At first glance the question of how children acquire language doesn’t seem difficult to answer. Don’t children just listen to what is said around them and imitate
the speech they hear? Imitation is involved to some extent. An American child
may hear milk and a Mexican child leche and each attempts to reproduce what
is heard. But the early words and sentences that children produce show that they
are not simply imitating adult speech. Many times the words are barely recognizable to an adult and the meanings are also not always like the adult’s, as we
will discuss below.
Children do not hear words like holded or tooths or sentences such as Cat
stand up table or many of the other utterances they produce between the ages of
two and three, such as the following:1
1Many
of the examples of child language in this chapter are taken from CHILDES (Child
Language Data Exchange System), a computerized database of the spontaneous speech of
children acquiring English and many other languages. MacWhinney, B., and C. Snow. 1985.
The child language data exchange system. Journal of Child Language 12:271–96.
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CHAPTER 7 Language Acquisition
a my pencil
two foot
what the boy hit?
other one pants
Mommy get it my ladder
cowboy did fighting me
Even when children are trying to imitate what they hear, they are unable to
produce sentences outside of the rules of their developing grammar. The following are a child’s attempt to imitate what the adult has said:
adult:
adult:
adult:
He’s going out.
That’s an old-time train.
Adam, say what I say.
Where can I put them?
child:
child:
He go out.
Old-time train.
child:
Where I can put them?
Imitation also fails to account for the fact that children who are unable to
speak for neurological or physiological reasons are able to learn the language
spoken to them and understand it. When they overcome their speech impairment, they immediately use the language for speaking.
Do Children Learn through Correction
and Reinforcement?
Child:
Mother:
Child:
Mother:
Child:
Nobody don’t like me.
No, say “Nobody likes me.”
Nobody don’t like me.
(dialogue repeated eight times)
Now, listen carefully; say “Nobody likes me.”
Oh, nobody don’t likes me.
ANONYMOUS MOTHER AND CHILD
Another proposal, in the behaviorist tradition, is that children learn to produce
correct (grammatical) sentences because they are positively reinforced when
they say something grammatical and negatively reinforced (corrected) when
they say something ungrammatical. Roger Brown and his colleagues at Harvard University studied parent–child interactions. They report that correction
seldom occurs, and when it does, it is usually for mispronunciations or incorrect reporting of facts and not for “bad grammar.” They note, for example,
that the ungrammatical sentence “Her curl my hair” was not corrected because
the child’s mother was in fact curling her hair. However, when the child uttered
the grammatical sentence “Walt Disney comes on Tuesday,” she was corrected
because the television program was shown on Wednesday. Brown concludes
that it is “truth value rather than syntactic well-formedness that chiefly governs
explicit verbal reinforcement by parents—which renders mildly paradoxical the
fact that the usual product of such a training schedule is an adult whose speech
is highly grammatical but not notably truthful.”
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
Adults will sometimes recast children’s utterances into an adultlike form, as
in the following examples:
Child
Mother
It fall.
Where is them?
It doing dancing.
It fell?
They’re at home.
It’s dancing, yes.
In these examples, the mother provides the correct model without actually
correcting the child. Although recasts are potentially helpful to the child, they
are not used in a consistent way. One study of forty mothers of children two to
four years old showed that only about 25 percent of children’s ungrammatical
sentences are recast and that overall, grammatical sentences were recast as often
as bad sentences. Parents tend to focus on the correctness of content more than
on grammaticality. So parents allow many ungrammatical utterances to “slip
by” and change many grammatical utterances. A child who relied on recasts to
learn grammar would be mightily confused.
Even if adults did correct children’s syntax more often than they do, it would
still not explain how or what children learn from such adult responses, or how
children discover and construct the correct rules. Children do not know what
they are doing wrong and are unable to make corrections even when they are
pointed out, as shown by the preceding example and the following one:
child:
father:
child:
father:
child:
father:
child:
father:
child:
father:
child:
Want other one spoon, Daddy.
You mean, you want the other spoon.
Yes, I want other one spoon, please, Daddy.
Can you say “the other spoon”?
Other . . . one . . . spoon.
Say . . . “other.”
Other.
Spoon.
Spoon.
Other . . . spoon.
Other . . . spoon. Now give me other one spoon?
Such conversations between parents and children do not occur often; this
conversation was between a linguist studying child language and his child.
Mothers and fathers are usually delighted that their young children are talking
and consider every utterance a gem. The “mistakes” children make are cute and
repeated endlessly to anyone who will listen.
Do Children Learn Language through Analogy?
It has also been suggested that children put words together to form phrases and
sentences by analogy, by hearing a sentence and using it as a model to form
other sentences. But this is also problematic, as Lila Gleitman, an expert on
developmental psycholinguistics, points out:
[S]uppose the child has heard the sentence “I painted a red barn.” So now,
by analogy, the child can say “I painted a blue barn.” That’s exactly the
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kind of theory that we want. You hear a sample and you extend it to all of
the new cases by similarity. . . . In addition to “I painted a red barn” you
might also hear the sentence “I painted a barn red.” So it looks as if you
take those last two words and switch their order. . . . So now you want
to extend this to the case of seeing, because you want to look at barns
instead of paint them. So you have heard, “I saw a red barn.” Now you
try (by analogy) a . . . new sentence—“I saw a barn red.” Something’s
gone wrong. This is an analogy, but the analogy didn’t work. It’s not a
sentence of English.2
This kind of problem arises constantly. Consider another example. The child
hears the following pair of sentences:
The boy was sleeping.
Was the boy sleeping?
Based on pairs of sentences like this, he formulates a rule for forming questions: “Move the auxiliary to the position preceding the subject.” He then
acquires the more complex relative clause construction:
The boy who is sleeping is dreaming about a new car.
He now wants to form a question. What does he do? If he forms a question
on analogy to the simple yes-no question, he will move the first auxiliary is as
follows:
*Is the boy who sleeping is dreaming about a new car?
Studies of spontaneous speech, as well as experiments, show that children
never make mistakes of this sort. As discussed in chapter 2, syntactic rules, such
as the rule that moves the auxiliary, are sensitive to the structure of the sentence
and not to the linear order of words. The available evidence shows that children
know about the structure dependency of rules at a very early age.
In recent years, a computer model of language representation and acquisition
called connectionism has been proposed that relies in part on behaviorist learning principles such as analogy and reinforcement. In the connectionist model, no
grammatical rules are stored anywhere. Linguistic knowledge, such as knowledge of the past tense, is represented by a set of neuron-like connections between
different phonological forms (e.g., between play and played, dance and danced,
drink and drank). Repeated exposure to particular verb pairs in the input reinforces the connection between them, mimicking rule-like behavior. Based on
similarities between words, the model can produce a past-tense form that it was
not previously exposed to. On analogy to dance-danced, it will convert prance
to pranced; on analogy to drink-drank it will convert sink to sank.
As a model of language acquisition, connectionism faces some serious challenges. The model assumes that the language of the child’s environment has very
specific properties. However, investigation of the input that children actually
receive shows that it is not consistent with those assumptions. Another problem
2Gleitman,
L. R., and E. Wanner. 1982. Language acquisition: The state of the art. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
is that rules such as formation of past tense cannot be based on phonological
form alone but must also be sensitive to information in the lexicon. For example,
the past tense of a verb derived from a noun is always regular even if an irregular
form exists. When a fly ball is caught in a baseball game, we say the batter flied
out, not flew out. Similarly, when an irregular plural is part of a larger noun, it
may be regularized. When we see several images of Walt Disney’s famous rodent,
we describe them as Mickey Mouses, not Mickey Mice.
Do Children Learn through Structured Input?
Yet another suggestion is that children are able to learn language because adults
speak to them in a special “simplified” language sometimes called motherese,
or child-directed speech (CDS) (or more informally, baby talk). This hypothesis
places a lot of emphasis on the role of the environment in facilitating language
acquisition.
In our culture adults do typically talk to young children in a special way.
We tend to speak more slowly and more clearly, we may speak in a higher pitch
and exaggerate our intonation, and sentences are generally grammatical. However, motherese is not syntactically simpler. It contains a range of sentence types,
including syntactically complex sentences such as questions (Do you want your
juice now?); embedded sentences (Mommy thinks you should sleep now); imperatives (Pat the dog gently!); and negatives with tag questions (We don’t want to
hurt him, do we?). And adults do not simplify their language by dropping inflections from verbs and nouns or by omitting function words such as determiners
and auxiliaries, though children do this all the time. It is probably a good thing
that motherese is not syntactically restricted. If it were, children might not have
sufficient information to extract the rules of their language.
Although infants prefer to listen to motherese over normal adult speech, studies show that using motherese does not significantly affect the child’s language
development. In many cultures, adults do not use a special style of language with
children, and there are even communities in which adults hardly talk to babies at
all. Nevertheless, children around the world acquire language in much the same
way, irrespective of these varying circumstances. Adults seem to be the followers
rather than the leaders in this enterprise. The child does not develop linguistically because he is exposed to ever more adultlike language. Rather, the adult
adjusts his language to the child’s increasing linguistic sophistication. The exaggerated intonation and other properties of motherese may be useful for getting a
child’s attention and for reassuring the child, but it is not a driving force behind
language development.
Analogy, imitation, and reinforcement cannot account for language development because they are based on the (implicit or explicit) assumption that what the
child acquires is a set of sentences or forms rather than a set of grammatical rules.
Theories that assume that acquisition depends on a specially structured input also
place too much emphasis on the environment rather than on the grammar-making
abilities of the child. These proposals do not explain the creativity that children
show in acquiring language, why they go through stages, or why they make some
kinds of “errors” but not others, for example, “Give me other one spoon” but not
“Is the boy who sleeping is dreaming about a new car?”
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CHAPTER 7 Language Acquisition
Children Construct Grammars
We are designed to walk. . . . That we are taught to walk is impossible. And pretty much
the same is true of language. Nobody is taught language. In fact you can’t prevent the
child from learning it.
NOAM CHOMSKY, The Human Language Series program 2, 1994
Language acquisition is a creative process. Children are not given explicit information about the rules, by either instruction or correction. They extract the rules
of the grammar from the language they hear around them, and their linguistic
environment does not need to be special in any way for them to do this. Observations of children acquiring different languages under different cultural and social
circumstances reveal that the developmental stages are similar, possibly universal. Even deaf children of deaf signing parents go through stages in their signing
development that parallel those of children acquiring spoken languages. These
factors lead many linguists to believe that children are equipped with an innate
template or blueprint for language—which we have referred to as Universal
Grammar (UG)—and that this blueprint aids the child in the task of constructing
a grammar for her language. This is referred to as the innateness hypothesis.
The Innateness Hypothesis
© ScienceCartoonsPlus.com
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
The innateness hypothesis receives its strongest support from the observation
that the grammar a person ends up with is vastly underdetermined by his linguistic experience. In other words, we end up knowing far more about language
than is exemplified in the language we hear around us. This argument for the
innateness of UG is called the poverty of the stimulus.
Although children hear many utterances, the language they hear is incomplete,
noisy, and unstructured. We said earlier that child-directed speech is largely well
formed, but children are also exposed to adult–adult interactions. These utterances include slips of the tongue, false starts, ungrammatical and incomplete
sentences, and no consistent information as to which utterances are well formed
and which are not. But most important is the fact that children come to know
aspects of the grammar about which they receive no information. In this sense,
the data they are exposed to is impoverished. It is less than what is necessary to
account for the richness and complexity of the grammar they attain.
For example, we noted that the rules children construct are structure dependent. Children do not produce questions by moving the first auxiliary as in (1)
below. Instead, they correctly invert the auxiliary of the main clause, as in (2).
(We use ___ to mark the position from which a constituent moves.)
1.
2.
*Is the boy who ___ sleeping is dreaming of a new car?
Is the boy who is sleeping ___ dreaming of a new car?
To come up with a rule that moves the auxiliary of the main clause rather
than the first auxiliary, the child must know something about the structure of
the sentence. Children are not told about structure dependency. They are not
told about constituent structure. Indeed, adults who have not studied linguistics
do not explicitly know about structure dependency, constituent structure, and
other abstract properties of grammar and so could not instruct their children
even if they were so inclined. This knowledge is tacit or implicit. The input children get is a sequence of sounds, not a set of phrase structure trees. No amount
of imitation, reinforcement, analogy, or structured input will lead the child to
formulate a phrase structure tree, much less a principle of structure dependency.
Yet, children do create phrase structures, and the rules they acquire are sensitive
to this structure.
The child must also learn many aspects of grammar from her specific linguistic environment. English-speaking children learn that the subject comes first
and that the verb precedes the object inside the VP, that is, that English is an
SVO language. Japanese children acquire an SOV language. They learn that the
object precedes the verb.
English-speaking children must learn that yes-no questions are formed by
moving the auxiliary to the beginning of the sentence, as follows:
You will come home. → Will you ___ come home?
Japanese children learn that to form a yes-no question, the morpheme -ka is
suffixed to a verb stem.
Tanaka ga sushi o tabete iru
Tanaka ga sushi o tabete iruka
“Tanaka is eating sushi.”
“Is Tanaka eating sushi?”
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CHAPTER 7 Language Acquisition
In Japanese questions, sentence constituents are not rearranged.
According to the innateness hypothesis, the child extracts from the linguistic
environment those rules of grammar that are language specific, such as word
order and movement rules. But he does not need to learn universal principles
like structure dependency, or general principles of sentence formation such as
the fact that heads of categories can take complements. All these principles are
part of the innate blueprint for language that children use to construct the grammar of their language.
The innateness hypothesis provides an answer to the logical problem of language acquisition posed by Chomsky: What accounts for the ease, rapidity,
and uniformity of language acquisition in the face of impoverished data? The
answer is that children acquire a complex grammar quickly and easily without any particular help beyond exposure to the language because they do not
start from scratch. UG provides them with a significant head start. It helps them
to extract the rules of their language and to avoid many grammatical errors.
Because the child constructs his grammar according to an innate blueprint, all
children proceed through similar developmental stages, as we will discuss in the
next section.
The innateness hypothesis also predicts that all languages will conform to the
principles of UG. We are still far from understanding the full nature of the principles of UG. Research on more languages provides a way to test any principles
that linguists propose. If we investigate a language in which a posited UG principle is absent, we will have to correct our theory and substitute other principles,
as scientists must do in any field. But there is little doubt that human languages
conform to abstract universal principles and that the human brain is specially
equipped for acquisition of human language grammars.
Stages in Language Acquisition
. . . for I was no longer a speechless infant; but a speaking boy. This I remember; and have
since observed how I learned to speak. It was not that my elders taught me words . . . in
any set method; but I . . . did myself . . . practice the sounds in my memory. . . . And thus
by constantly hearing words, as they occurred in various sentences . . . I thereby gave
utterance to my will.
ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions, 398 c.e.
Children do not wake up one fine morning with a fully formed grammar in their
heads. Relative to the complexity of the adult grammar that they eventually
attain, the process of language acquisition is fast, but it is not instantaneous.
From first words to virtual adult competence takes three to five years, during
which time children pass through linguistic stages. They begin by babbling, they
then acquire their first words, and in just a few months they begin to put words
together into sentences.
Observations of children acquiring different languages reveal that the stages
are similar, possibly universal. The earliest studies of child language acquisition come from diaries kept by parents. More recent studies include the use of
tape recordings, videotapes, and controlled experiments. Linguists record the
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
spontaneous utterances of children and purposefully elicit other utterances to
study the child’s production and comprehension. Researchers have also invented
ingenious techniques for investigating the linguistic abilities of infants, who are
not yet speaking.
Children’s early utterances may not look exactly like adult sentences, but
child language is not just a degenerate form of adult language. The words and
sentences that the child produces at each stage of development conform to the
set of grammatical rules he has developed to that point. Although child grammars and adult grammars differ in certain respects, they also share many formal
properties. Like adults, children have grammatical categories such as NP and
VP, rules for building phrase structures and for moving constituents, as well as
phonological, morphological, and semantic rules, and they adhere to universal
principles such as structure dependency.
From the perspective of the adult grammar, sentences such as Nobody don’t
like me and Want other one spoon, Daddy contain grammatical errors, but such
“errors” often reflect the child’s current stage of grammatical competence and
therefore provide researchers with a window into their grammar.
The Perception and Production of Speech Sounds
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
ALFRED LORD TENNYSON, In Memoriam A.H.H., 1849
The notion that a person is born with a mind like a blank slate is belied by a
wealth of evidence that newborns are reactive to some subtle distinctions in their
environment and not to others. That is, the mind appears to be attuned at birth
to receive certain kinds of information. Infants will respond to visual depth and
distance distinctions, to differences between rigid and flexible physical properties of objects, and to human faces rather than to other visual stimuli.
Infants also show a very early response to different properties of language.
Experiments demonstrate that infants will increase their sucking rate—measured
by ingeniously designed pacifiers—when stimuli (visual or auditory) presented to
them are varied, but will decrease the sucking rate when the same stimuli are
presented repeatedly. Early in acquisition when tested with a preferential listening technique, they will also turn their heads toward and listen longer to sounds,
stress patterns, and words that are familiar to them. These instinctive responses
can be used to measure a baby’s ability to discriminate and recognize different
linguistic stimuli.
A newborn will respond to phonetic contrasts found in human languages
even when these differences are not phonemic in the language spoken in the
baby’s home. A baby hearing a human voice over a loudspeaker saying [pa] [pa]
[pa] will slowly decrease her rate of sucking. If the sound changes to [ba] or even
[pʰa], the sucking rate increases dramatically. Controlled experiments show that
adults find it difficult to differentiate between the allophones of one phoneme,
but for infants it comes naturally. Japanese infants can distinguish between [r]
and [l] whereas their parents cannot; babies can hear the difference between
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aspirated and unaspirated stops even if students in an introductory linguistics
course cannot. Babies can discriminate between sounds that are phonemic in
other languages and nonexistent in the language of their parents. For example,
in Hindi, there is a phonemic contrast between a retroflex “t” [ʈ] (made with the
tongue curled back) and the alveolar [t]. To English-speaking adults, these may
sound the same; to their infants, they do not.
Infants can perceive voicing contrasts such as [pa] versus [ba], contrasts in
place of articulation such as [da] versus [ga], and contrasts in manner of articulation such as [ra] versus [la], or [ra] versus [wa], among many others. Babies will
not react, however, to distinctions that never correspond to phonemic contrasts
in any human language, such as sounds spoken more or less loudly or sounds
that lie between two phonemes. Furthermore, a vowel that we perceive as [i],
for example, is a different physical sound when produced by a male, female,
or child, but babies ignore the nonlinguistic aspects of the speech signal just as
adults do.
Infants appear to be born with the ability to perceive just those sounds that
are phonemic in some language. It is therefore possible for children to learn any
human language they are exposed to. During the first year of life, the infant’s
job is to uncover the sounds of the ambient language. From around six months,
he begins to lose the ability to discriminate between sounds that are not phonemic in his own language. His linguistic environment molds the infant’s initial perceptions. Japanese infants can no longer hear the difference between [r]
and [l], which do not contrast in Japanese, whereas babies in English-speaking
homes retain this perception. They have begun to learn the sounds of the language of their parents. Before that, they appear to know the sounds of human
language in general.
Babbling
“Hi & Lois” © King Features Syndicate
The shaping by the linguistic environment that we see in perception also occurs
in the speech the infant is producing. At around six months, the infant begins
to babble. The sounds produced in this period include many sounds that do
not occur in the language of the household. However, babbling is not linguistic
chaos. The twelve most frequent consonants in the world’s languages make up
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
95 percent of the consonants infants use in their babbling. There are linguistic
constraints even during this very early stage. The early babbles consist mainly of
repeated consonant-vowel sequences, like mama, gaga, and dada. Later babbles
are more varied.
By the end of the first year the child’s babbles come to include only those
sounds and sound combinations that occur in the target language. Babbles begin
to sound like words, although they may not have any specific meaning attached
to them. At this point adults can distinguish the babbles of an English-babbling
infant from those of an infant babbling in Cantonese or Arabic. During the first
year of life, the infant’s perceptions and productions are being fine-tuned to the
surrounding language(s).
Deaf infants produce babbling sounds that are different from those of hearing
children. Babbling is related to auditory input and is linguistic in nature. Studies of vocal babbling of hearing children and manual babbling of deaf children
support the view that babbling is a linguistic ability related to the kind of language input the child receives. These studies show that four- to seven-monthold hearing infants exposed to spoken language produce a restricted set of phonetic forms. At the same age, deaf children exposed to sign language produce a
restricted set of signs. In each case the forms are drawn from the set of possible
sounds or possible gestures found in spoken and signed languages.
Babbling illustrates the readiness of the human mind to respond to linguistic
input from a very early stage. During the babbling stage, the intonation contours
produced by hearing infants begin to resemble the intonation contours of sentences spoken by adults. The different intonation contours are among the first
linguistic contrasts that children perceive and produce. During this same period,
the vocalizations produced by deaf babies are random and nonrepetitive. Similarly, the manual gestures produced by hearing babies differ greatly from those
produced by deaf infants exposed to sign language. The hearing babies move
their fingers and clench their fists randomly with little or no repetition of gestures. The deaf infants, however, use more than a dozen different hand motions
repetitively, all of which are elements of American Sign Language or the sign
languages used in deaf communities of other countries.
The generally accepted view is that humans are born with a predisposition to
discover the units that serve to express linguistic meanings, and that at a genetically specified stage in neural development, the infant will begin to produce
these units—sounds or gestures—depending on the language input the baby
receives. This suggests that babbling is the earliest stage in language acquisition,
in opposition to an earlier view that babbling was prelinguistic and merely neuromuscular in origin. The “babbling as language acquisition” hypothesis is supported by recent neurological studies that link babbling to the language centers
of the left hemisphere, also providing further evidence that the brain specializes
for language functions at a very early age, as discussed in the introduction.
First Words
From this golden egg a man, Prajapati, was born. . . . A year having passed, he wanted to
speak. He said “bhur” and the earth was created. He said “bhuvar” and the space of the air
was created. He said “suvar” and the sky was created. That is why a child wants to speak
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after a year. . . . When Prajapati spoke for the first time, he uttered one or two syllables.
That is why a child utters one or two syllables when he speaks for the first time.
HINDU MYTH
Some time after the age of one, the child begins to repeatedly use the same string
of sounds to mean the same thing. At this stage children realize that sounds are
related to meanings. They have produced their first true words. The age of the
child when this occurs varies and has nothing to do with the child’s intelligence.
(It is reported that Einstein did not start to speak until he was three or four
years old.)
The child’s first utterances differ from adult language. The following words
of one child, J. P., at the age of sixteen months, illustrate the point:
[ʔaʊ]
[bʌʔ]/[mʌʔ]
[da]
[iʔo]/[siʔo]
[sa]
[aɪ]/[ʌɪ]
[baʊ]/[daʊ]
“not,” “no,” “don’t”
“up”
“dog”
“Cheerios”
“sock”
“light”
“down”
[sː]
[sʲuː]
[haɪ]
[sr]
[sæː]/[əsæː]
[ma]
[dæ]
“aerosol spray”
“shoe”
“hi”
“shirt,” “sweater”
“what’s that?”/“hey, look!”
“mommy”
“daddy”
Most children go through a stage in which their utterances consist of only
one word. This is called the holophrastic or “whole phrase” stage because these
one-word utterances seem to convey a more complex message. For example,
when J. P. says “down” he may be making a request to be put down, or he may
be commenting on a toy that has fallen down from the shelf. When he says
“cheerios” he may simply be naming the box of cereal in front of him, or he may
be asking for some Cheerios. This suggests that children have a more complex
mental representation than their language allows them to express. Comprehension experiments confirm the hypothesis that children’s productive abilities do
not fully reflect their underlying grammatical competence.
It has been claimed that deaf babies develop their first signs earlier than hearing children speak their first words. This has led to the development of Baby
Sign, a technique in which hearing parents learn and model for their babies various “signs,” such as a sign for “milk,” “hurt,” and “mother.” The idea is that the
baby can communicate his needs manually even before he is able to articulate
spoken words. Promoters of Baby Sign (and many parents) say that this leads to
less frustration and less crying. The claim that signs appear earlier than words
is controversial. Some linguists argue that what occurs earlier in both deaf and
hearing babies are pre-linguistic gestures that lack the systematic meaning of
true signs. Baby Sign may perhaps be exploiting this earlier manual dexterity,
and not a precocious linguistic development. More research is needed.
Segmenting the Speech Stream
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.
TRANSCRIBED FROM VOCALS BY TOM STACKS, performing with Harry Reser’s
Six Jumping Jacks, January 14, 1928
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
The acquisition of first words is an amazing feat. How do infants discover where
one word begins and another leaves off? Speech is a continuous stream broken only by breath pauses. Children are in the same fix that you might be in if
you tuned in a foreign-language radio station. You wouldn’t have the foggiest
idea of what was being said or what the words were. Intonation breaks that do
exist do not necessarily correspond to word, phrase, or sentence boundaries.
The adult speaker with knowledge of the lexicon and grammar of a language
imposes structure on the speech he hears, but a person without such knowledge
cannot. How then do babies, who have not yet learned the lexicon or rules of
grammar, extract the words from the speech they hear around them? The ability
to segment the continuous speech stream into discrete units—words—is one of
the remarkable feats of language acquisition.
Studies show that infants are remarkably good at extracting information from
continuous speech. They seem to know what kind of cues to look for in the input
that will help them to isolate words. One of the cues that English-speaking children attend to that helps them figure out word boundaries is stress.
As noted in chapter 5, every content word in English has a stressed syllable.
(Function words such as the, a, am, can, etc. are ordinarily unstressed.) If the
content word is monosyllabic, then that syllable is stressed as in dóg or hám.
Bisyllabic content words can be trochaic, which means that stress is on the first
syllable, as in páper or dóctor, or iambic, which means stress is on the second
syllable, as in giráffe or devíce. The vast majority of English words have trochaic
stress. In controlled experiments adult speakers are quicker to recognize words
with trochaic stress than words with iambic stress. This can be explained if
English-speaking adults follow a strategy of taking a stressed syllable to mark
the onset of a new word.
But what about children? Could they avail themselves of the same strategy?
Stress is very salient to infants, and they are quick to acquire the rhythmic structure of their language. Using the preferential listening technique mentioned earlier, researchers have shown that at just a few months old infants are able to
discriminate native and non-native stress patterns. Before the end of the first
year their babbling takes on the rhythmic pattern of the ambient language. At
about nine months old, English-speaking children prefer to listen to bisyllabic
words with initial rather than final stress. And most notably, studies show that
infants acquiring English can indeed use stress cues to segment words in fluent
speech. In a series of experiments, infants who were seven and a half months
old listened to passages with repeated instances of a trochaic word such as
púppy, and passages with iambic words such as guitár. They were then played
lists of words, some of which had occurred in the previous passage and others
that had not. Experimenters measured the length of time that they listened to
the familiar versus unfamiliar words. The results showed that children listened
significantly longer (indicated by turning their head in the direction of the loudspeaker) to words that they had heard in the passage, but only when the words
had the trochaic pattern (púppy). For words with the iambic pattern (guitár),
the children responded only to the stressed syllable (tár), though the monosyllabic word tar had not appeared in the passage. These results suggest that the
infants—like adults—are taking the stressed syllable to mark the onset of a new
word. Following such a strategy will sometimes lead to errors (for iambic words
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and unstressed function words), but it provides the child with a way of getting
started. This is sometimes referred to as prosodic bootstrapping. Infants can use
the stress pattern of the language as a start to word learning.
Infants are also sensitive to phonotactic constraints and to the distribution
of allophones in the target language. For example, we noted in chapter 5 that
in English aspiration typically occurs at the beginning of a stressed syllable—
[pʰɪt] versus [spɪt]—and that certain combinations of sounds are more likely to
occur at the end of a word rather than at the beginning, for example [rt]. Studies
show that nine-month-olds can use this information to help segment speech into
words in English.
Languages differ in their stress patterns as well as in their allophonic variation and phonotactics. Wouldn’t the infant then need some way to first figure
out what stress pattern he is dealing with, or what the allophones and possible
sound combinations are, before he could use this information to extract the
words of his language from fluent speech? This seems to be a classic chicken and
egg problem—he has to know the language to learn the language. A way out of
this conundrum is provided by the finding that infants may also rely on statistical properties of the input to segment words, such as the frequency with which
particular sequences of sounds occur.
In one study, eight-month-old infants listened to two minutes of speech
formed from four nonsense words, pabiku, tutibu, golabu, babupu. The words
were produced by a speech synthesizer and strung together in three different
orders, analogous to three different sentences, without any pauses or other phonetic cues to the word boundaries. Here is an example of what the children
heard:
golabupabikututibubabupugolabubabupututibu. . . . .
After listening to the strings the infants were tested to see if they could distinguish the “words” of the language, for example pabiku (which, recall, they had
never heard in isolation before), from sequences of syllables that spanned word
boundaries, such as bubabu (also in the input). Despite the very brief exposure
and the lack of boundary cues, the infants were able to distinguish the words
from the nonwords. The authors of the study conclude that the children do this
by tracking the frequency with which the different sequences of syllables occur:
the sequences inside the words (e.g., pa-bi-ku) remain the same whatever order
the words are presented in, but the sequences of syllables that cross word boundaries will change in the different presentations and hence these sequences will
occur much less frequently. Though it is still unclear how much such statistical
procedures can accomplish with real language input, which is vastly larger and
more varied, this experiment and others like it suggest that babies are sensitive
to statistical information as well as to linguistic structure to extract words from
the input. It is possible that they first rely on statistical properties to isolate
some words, and then, based on these words, they are able to detect the rhythmic, allophonic, and phonotactic properties of the language, and with this further knowledge they can do further segmentation. Studies that measure infants’
reliance on statistics versus stress for segmenting words support this two stage
model: younger infants (seven-and-a-half months old) respond to frequency
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
while older infants (nine months old) attend to stress, allophonic, and phonotactic information.
The Development of Grammar
Children are biologically equipped to acquire all aspects of grammar. In this
section we will look at development in each of the components of language, and
we will illustrate the role that Universal Grammar and other factors play in this
development.
The Acquisition of Phonology
“Baby Blues” © Baby Blues Partnership. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
In terms of his phonology, J. P. is like most children at the one-word stage. The
first words are generally monosyllabic with a CV (consonant-vowel) form. The
vowel part may be a diphthong, depending on the language being acquired.
The phonemic inventory is much smaller than is found in the adult language.
It appears that children first acquire the small set of sounds common to all languages regardless of the ambient language(s), and in later stages acquire the less
common sounds of their own language. For example, most languages have the
sounds [p] and [s], but [θ] is a rare sound. J. P.’s sound system followed this
pattern. His phonological inventory at an early stage included the consonants
[b,m,d,k], which are frequently occurring sounds in the world’s languages.
In general, the order of acquisition of classes of sounds begins with vowels
and then goes by manner of articulation for consonants: nasals are acquired
first, then glides, stops, liquids, fricatives, and affricates. Natural classes characterized by place of articulation features also appear in children’s utterances
according to a more or less ordered series: labials, velars, alveolars, and palatals.
It is not surprising that mama is an early word for many children.
The distribution and frequency of sounds in a language can also influence
the acquisition of certain segments. Sounds that are expected to be acquired late
may appear earlier in children’s language when they are frequently occurring.
For example, the fricative [v] is a very late acquisition in English but it is an
early phoneme in Estonian, Bulgarian, and Swedish, languages that have several
[v]-initial words that are common in the vocabularies of young children.
If the first year is devoted to figuring out the sounds of the target language,
the second year involves learning how these sounds are used in the phonology of
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the language, especially which contrasts are phonemic. When children first begin
to contrast one pair of a set (e.g., when they learn that /p/ and /b/ are distinct
phonemes due to a voicing difference), they also begin to distinguish between
other similar pairs (e.g., /t/ and /d/, /s/ and /z/, and all the other voiceless–voiced
phonemic pairs). As we would expect, the generalizations refer to natural classes
of speech sounds.
Controlled experiments show that children at this stage can perceive or comprehend many more phonological contrasts than they can produce. The same
child who says [wӕbɪt] instead of “rabbit,” and who does not seem to distinguish
[w] and [r], will not make mistakes on a picture identification task in which she
must point to either a ring or a wing. In addition, children sometimes produce
two different sounds in a way that makes them indiscernible to adult observers.
Acoustic analyses of children’s utterances show that although a child’s pronunciation of wing and ring may seem the same to the adult ear, they are physically
different sounds. As a further example, a spectrographic analysis of ephant,
“elephant,” produced by a three-year-old child, clearly showed an [l] in the representation of the word, even though the adult experimenter could not hear it.
Many anecdotal reports also show the disparity between the child’s production and perception at this stage. An example is the exchange between the linguist Neil Smith and his two-year-old son Amahl. At this age Amahl’s pronunciation of “mouth” is [maʊs].
NS:
A:
NS:
A:
NS:
A:
NS:
A:
What does [maʊs] mean?
Like a cat.
Yes, what else?
Nothing else.
It’s part of your head.
(fascinated)
(touching A’s mouth) What’s this?
[ma ʊs]
According to Smith, it took Amahl a few seconds to realize his word for
“mouse” and his word for “mouth” were the same. It is not that Amahl and
other children do not hear the correct adult pronunciation. They do, but they are
unable in these early years to produce it themselves. Another linguist’s child (yes,
linguists love to experiment on their own children) pronounced the word light as
yight [jaɪt] but would become very angry if someone said to him, “Oh, you want
me to turn on the yight.” “No no,” he would reply, “not yight—yight!”
Therefore, even at this stage, it is not possible to determine the extent of the
grammar of the child—in this case, the phonology—simply by observing speech
production. It is sometimes necessary to use various experimental and instrumental techniques to tap the child’s competence.
A child’s first words show many substitutions of one feature for another or one
phoneme for another. In the preceding examples, mouth [maʊθ] is pronounced
mouse [maʊs], with the alveolar fricative [s] replacing the less common interdental fricative [θ]; light [laɪt] is pronounced yight [jaɪt], with the glide [j] replacing
the liquid [l]; and rabbit is pronounced wabbit, with the glide [w] replacing the
liquid [r]. Glides are acquired earlier than liquids, and hence substitute for them.
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
These substitutions are simplifications of the adult pronunciation. They make
articulation easier until the child achieves greater articulatory control.
Children’s early pronunciations are not haphazard, however. The phonological substitutions are rule governed. The following is an abridged lexicon for
another child, Michael, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one months:
[pun]
[peɪn]
[tɪs]
[taʊ]
[tin]
[polər]
“spoon”
“plane”
“kiss”
“cow”
“clean”
“stroller”
[maɪtl]
[daɪtər]
[pati]
[mani]
[bәrt]
[bərt]
“Michael”
“diaper”
“Papi”
“Mommy”
“Bert”
“(Big) Bird”
Michael systematically substituted the alveolar stop [t] for the velar stop [k]
as in his words for “cow,” “clean,” “kiss,” and his own name. He also replaced
labial [p] with [t] when it occurred in the middle of a word, as in his words for
“Papi” and “diaper.” He reduced consonant clusters in “spoon,” “plane,” and
“stroller,” and he devoiced final stops as in “Big Bird.” In devoicing the final [d]
in “bird,” he created an ambiguous form [bәrt] referring both to Bert and Big
Bird. No wonder only parents understand their children’s first words!
Michael’s substitutions are typical of the phonological rules that operate in
the very early stages of acquisition. Other common rules are reduplication—
“bottle” becomes [baba], “water” becomes [wawa]; and the dropping of a final
consonants—“bed” becomes [be], “cake” becomes [ke]. These two rules show
that the child prefers a simple CV syllable.
Of the many phonological rules that children create, no child will necessarily use all rules. Early phonological rules generally reflect natural phonological
processes that also occur in adult languages. For example, various adult languages have a rule of syllable-final consonant devoicing (German does—/bʊnd/
is pronounced [bʊnt]—English doesn’t). Children do not create bizarre or whimsical rules. Their rules conform to the possibilities made available by Universal
Grammar.
The Acquisition of Word Meaning
Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning
thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. . . . Everything had a
name, and each name gave birth to a new thought.
HELEN KELLER, The Story of My Life, 1903
In addition to what it tells us about phonological regularities, the child’s early
vocabulary also provides insight into how children use words and construct
word meaning. For J. P. the word up was originally used only to mean “Get
me up!” when he was either on the floor or in his high chair, but later he used
it to mean “Get up!” to his mother as well. J. P. used his word for sock not only
for socks but also for other undergarments that are put on over the feet, such
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as undershorts. This illustrates how a child may extend the meaning of a word
from a particular referent to encompass a larger class.
When J. P. began to use words, the object had to be physically present, but
that requirement did not last very long. He first used “dog” only when pointing to a real dog, but later he used the word for pictures of dogs in various
books. A new word that entered J. P.’s vocabulary at seventeen months was “uhoh,” which he would say after he had an accident like spilling juice, or when
he deliberately poured his yogurt over the side of his high chair. His use of this
word shows his developing use of language for social purposes. At this time he
added two new words meaning “no,” [doː] and [no], which he used when anyone
attempted to take something from him that he wanted, or tried to make him do
something he did not want to do. He used them either with the imperative meaning of “Don’t do that!” or with the assertive meaning of “I don’t want to do
that.” Even at this early stage, J. P. was using words to convey a variety of ideas
and feelings, as well as his social awareness.
But how do children learn the meanings of words? Most people do not see
this aspect of acquisition as posing a great problem. The intuitive view is that
children look at an object, the mother says a word, and the child connects the
sounds with the object. However, this is not as easy as it seems:
A child who observes a cat sitting on a mat also observes . . . a mat
supporting a cat, a mat under a cat, a floor supporting a mat and a cat,
and so on. If the adult now says “The cat is on the mat” even while
pointing to the cat on the mat, how is the child to choose among these
interpretations of the situation?
Even if the mother simply says “cat,” and the child accidentally associates the
word with the animal on the mat, the child may interpret cat as “Cat,” the name
of a particular animal, or of an entire species. In other words, to learn a word
for a class of objects such as “cat” or “dog,” children have to figure out exactly
what the word refers to. Upon hearing the word dog in the presence of a dog,
how does the child know that “dog” can refer to any four-legged, hairy, barking creature? Should it include poodles, tiny Yorkshire terriers, bulldogs, and
Great Danes, all of which look rather different from one another? What about
cows, lambs, and other four-legged mammals? Why are they not “dogs”? The
important and very difficult question is: What relevant features define the class
of objects we call dog, and how does a child acquire knowledge of them? Even if
a child succeeds in associating a word with an object, nobody provides explicit
information about how to extend the use of that word to all the other objects to
which that word refers.
It is not surprising, therefore, that children often overextend a word’s meaning, as J. P. did with the word sock. A child may learn a word such as papa or
daddy, which she first uses only for her own father, and then extend its meaning
to apply to all men, just as she may use the word dog to mean any four-legged
creature. After the child has acquired her first seventy-five to one hundred words,
the overextended meanings start to narrow until they correspond to those of the
other speakers of the language. How this occurs is still not entirely understood.
On the other hand, early language learning may involve underextension, in
which a lexical item is used in an overly restrictive way. It is common for children
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
to first apply a word like bird only to the family’s pet canary without making a
connection to birds in the tree outside, as if the word were a proper noun. And
just as overextended meanings narrow in on the adult language, underextended
meanings broaden their scope until they match the target language.
The mystery surrounding the acquisition of word meanings has intrigued philosophers and psychologists as well as linguists. We know that all children view
the world in a similar fashion and apply the same general principles to help them
determine a word’s meaning. For example, overextensions are usually based on
physical attributes such as size, shape, and texture. Ball may refer to all round
things, bunny to all furry things, and so on. However, children will not make
overextensions based on color. In experiments, children will group objects by
shape and give them a name, but they will not assign a name to a group of red
objects.
If an experimenter points to an object and uses a nonsense word like blick,
saying that’s a blick, the child will interpret the word to refer to the whole object,
not one of its parts or attributes. Given the poverty of stimulus for word learning, principles like the “form over color principle” and the “whole object principle” help the child organize his experience in ways that facilitate word learning.
Without such principles, it is doubtful that children could learn words as quickly
as they do. Children learn approximately fourteen words a day for the first six
years of their lives. That averages to about 5,000 words per year. How many
students know 10,000 words of a foreign language after two years of study?
There is also experimental evidence that children can learn the meaning of
one class of words—verbs—based on the syntactic environment in which they
occur. If you were to hear a sentence such as John blipped Mary the gloon, you
would not know exactly what John did, but you would likely understand that
the sentence is describing a transfer of something from John to Mary. Similarly,
if you heard John gonked that Mary. . . . , you would conclude that the verb gonk
was a verb of communication like say or a mental verb like think. The complement types that a verb selects can provide clues to its meaning and thereby help
the child. This learning of word meaning based on syntax is referred to as syntactic bootstrapping.
The Acquisition of Morphology
“Baby Blues” © Baby Blues Partnership. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
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The child’s acquisition of morphology provides the clearest evidence of rule
learning. Children’s errors in morphology reveal that the child acquires the regular rules of the grammar and then overgeneralizes them. This overgeneralization
occurs when children treat irregular verbs and nouns as if they were regular.
We have probably all heard children say bringed, goed, drawed, and runned, or
foots, mouses, and sheeps.
These mistakes tell us much about how children learn language because such
forms could not arise through imitation; children use them in families in which
the parents never speak “bad English.” In fact, children generally go through
three phases in the acquisition of an irregular form:
Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
broke
brought
breaked
bringed
broke
brought
In phase 1 the child uses the correct term such as brought or broke. At this
point the child’s grammar does not relate the form brought to bring, or broke to
break. The words are treated as separate lexical entries. Phase 2 is crucial. This
is when the child constructs a rule for forming the past tense and attaches the
regular past-tense morpheme to all verbs—play, hug, help, as well as break and
bring. Children look for general patterns. What they do not know at phase 2 is
that there are exceptions to the rule. Now their language is more regular than
the adult language. During phase 3 the child learns that there are exceptions to
the rule, and then once again uses brought and broke, with the difference being
that these irregular forms will be related to the root forms.
The child’s morphological rules emerge quite early. In a classic study, preschool children and children in the first, second, and third grades were shown
a drawing of a nonsense animal like the funny creature shown in the following
picture. Each “animal” was given a nonsense name. The experimenter would
then say to the child, pointing to the picture, “This is a wug.”
Then the experimenter would show the child a picture of two of the animals
and say, “Now here is another one. There are two of them. There are two ___.”
The child’s task was to give the plural form, “wugs” [wʌgz]. Another little
make-believe animal was called a “bik,” and when the child was shown two
biks, he or she again was to say the plural form [bɪks]. The children applied
regular plural formation to words they had never heard, showing that they had
acquired the plural rule. Their ability to add [z] when the animal’s name ended
with a voiced sound, and [s] when there was a final voiceless consonant, showed
that the children were also using rules based on an understanding of natural
classes of phonological segments, and not simply imitating words they had previously heard.
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
More recently, studies of children acquiring languages with richer inflectional
morphologies than English reveal that they learn agreement at a very early age.
For example, Italian verbs must be inflected for number and person to agree
with the subject. This is similar to the English agreement rule “add s to the
verb” for third-person, singular subjects—He giggles a lot but We giggle a lot—
except that in Italian more verb forms must be acquired. Italian-speaking children between the ages of 1;10 (one year, ten months) and 2;4 correctly inflect
the verb, as the following utterances of Italian children show:
Tu leggi il libro.
Io vado fuori.
Dorme miao dorme.
Leggiamo il libro.
“You (second person singular) read the book.”
“I go (first person singular) outside.”
“Sleeps (third person singular) cat sleeps.”
“(We) read (first person plural) the book.”
Children acquiring other richly inflected languages such as Spanish, German,
Catalan, and Swahili quickly acquire agreement morphology. It is rare for them
to make agreement errors, just as it is rare for an English-speaking child to say
“I goes.”
In these languages there is also gender and number agreement between the
head noun and the article and adjectives inside the noun phrase. Children as
young as two years old respect these agreement requirements when producing
NPs, as shown by the following Italian examples:
E mia gonna.
Questo mio bimbo.
Guarda la mela piccolina.
Guarda il topo piccolino.
“(It) is my (feminine singular) skirt.”
“This my (masculine singular) baby.”
“Look at the little (feminine singular) apple.”
“Look at the little (masculine singular) mouse.”
Experimental studies with twenty-five-month-old French-speaking children
also show that they use gender information on determiners to help identify the
subsequent noun, for example, le ballon (the-masc. balloon) versus la banane
(the-fem. banana).
Children also show knowledge of the derivational rules of their language and
use these rules to create novel words. In English, for example, we can derive
verbs from nouns. From the noun microwave we now have a verb to microwave;
from the noun e(lectronic) mail we derived the verb to e-mail. Children acquire
this derivational rule early and use it often because there are lots of gaps in their
verb vocabulary.
Child Utterance
Adult Translation
You have to scale it.
I broomed it up.
He’s keying the door.
“You have to weigh it.”
“I swept it up.”
“He’s opening the door (with a key).”
These novel forms provide further evidence that language acquisition is a
creative process and that children’s utterances reflect their internal grammars,
which include both derivational and inflectional rules.
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The Acquisition of Syntax
“Doonesbury” © 1984 G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved.
When children are still in the holophrastic stage, adults listening to the one-word
utterances often feel that the child is trying to convey a more complex message.
Experimental techniques show that at that stage (and even earlier), children have
knowledge of some syntactic rules. In these experiments the infant sits on his
mother’s lap and hears a sentence over a speaker while seeing two video displays
depicting different actions, one of which corresponds to the sentence. Infants
tend to look longer at the video that matches the sentence they hear. This methodology allows researchers to tap the linguistic knowledge of children who are
using only single words or who are not talking at all. Results show that children
as young as seventeen months can understand the difference between sentences
such as “Ernie is tickling Bert” and “Bert is tickling Ernie.” Because these sentences have all the same words, the child cannot be relying on the words alone
to understand the meanings. He must also understand the word-order rules and
how they determine the grammatical relations of subject and object. This same
preferential looking technique has shown that eighteen-month-olds can distinguish between subject and object wh questions, such as What is the apple hitting? and What hit the apple? These results and many others strongly suggest
that children’s syntactic competence is ahead of their productive abilities, which
is also how their phonology develops.
Around the time of their second birthday, children begin to put words
together. At first these utterances appear to be strings of two of the child’s earlier holophrastic utterances, each word with its own single-pitch contour. Soon,
they begin to form actual two-word sentences with clear syntactic and semantic relations. The intonation contour of the two words extends over the whole
utterance rather than being separated by a pause between the two words. The
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
following utterances illustrate the kinds of patterns that are found in children’s
utterances at this stage:
allgone sock
bye bye boat
more wet
Katherine sock
hi Mommy
allgone sticky
it ball
dirty sock
These early utterances can express a variety of semantic and syntactic relations.
For example, noun + noun sentences such as Mommy sock can express a subject
+ object relation in the situation when the mother is putting the sock on the child,
or a possessive relation when the child is pointing to Mommy’s sock. Two nouns
can also be used to show a subject-locative relation, as in sweater chair to mean
“The sweater is on the chair,” or to show attribution as in dirty sock. Children
often have a variety of modifiers such as allgone, more, and bye bye.
Because children mature at different rates and the age at which children start
to produce words and put words together varies, chronological age is not a good
measure of a child’s language development. Instead, researchers use the child’s
mean length of utterances (MLU) to measure progress. MLU is the average
length of the utterances the child is producing at a particular point. MLU can
be measured in terms of morphemes, so words like boys, danced, and crying
each have a value of two (morphemes). MLU can also be measured in term of
words, which is a more revealing measure when comparing children acquiring
languages with different morphological systems. Children with the same MLU
are likely to have similar grammars even though they are different ages.
In their earliest multiword utterances, children are inconsistent in their use of
function words (grammatical morphemes) such as a and the, subject pronouns,
auxiliary verbs such as can and is, and verbal inflection. Many (though not all)
utterances consist only of open-class or content words, while some or all of the
function words, auxiliaries, and verbal inflection may be missing. During this
stage children often sound as if they are sending an e-message or reading an oldfashioned telegram (containing only the required words for basic understanding), which is why such utterances are sometimes called “telegraphic speech,”
and we call this the telegraphic stage of the child’s language development.
Cat stand up table.
What that?
He play little tune.
Andrew want that.
Cathy build house.
No sit there.
Ride truck.
Show Mommy that.
J. P.’s early sentences were similar (the words in parentheses are missing from
J. P.’s sentences):
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Age in Months
25
26
27
28
[danʔ ɪʔ tsɪʔ]
[bʷaʔ tat]
[mamis tu hӕs]
[mo bʌs go]
[dӕdi go]
[ʔaɪ gat tu dʲus]
[do baɪʔ mi]
[kʌder sʌni ber]
[ʔaɪ gat pwe dɪs]
[mamis tak mɛns]
“Don’t eat (the) chip.”
“Block (is on) top.”
“Mommy’s two hands.”
“Where bus go?”
“(Where) Daddy go?”
“I got two (glasses of) juice.”
“Don’t bite (kiss) me.”
“Sonny color(ed a) bear.”
“I(’m) play(ing with) this.”
“Mommy talk(ed to the) men.”
It can take many months before children use all the grammatical morphemes
and auxiliary verbs consistently. However, the child does not deliberately leave
out function words as would an adult sending a twitter. The sentences reflect the
child’s linguistic capacity at that particular stage of language development.
There is a great deal of debate among linguists about how to characterize telegraphic speech: Do children omit function morphemes because of limitations in
their ability to produce longer, more complex sentences, or do they omit these
morphemes because their grammar permits such elements to be unexpressed? On
the first account, telegraphic speech is due to performance limitations: Since there
is an upper limit on the length of utterance a child can produce, and function morphemes are prosodically and semantically weak, they are omitted. On the second
view, telegraphic speech is an early grammatical stage similar to languages like
Italian or Spanish that allow subject pronouns to be dropped, as in Hablo ingles
“(I) speak English,” or Chinese, which lacks many types of determiners.
Although these sentences may lack certain morphemes, they nevertheless
appear to have hierarchical constituent structures and syntactic rules similar
to those in the adult grammar. For example, children almost never violate the
word-order rules of their language. In languages with relatively fixed word order
such as English and Japanese, children use the required order (SVO in English,
SOV in Japanese) from the earliest stage. In languages with freer word order,
like Turkish and Russian, grammatical relations such as subject and object are
generally marked by inflectional morphology, such as case markers. Children
acquiring these languages quickly learn the morphological case markers. For
example, Russian- and German-speaking children mark subjects with nominative case and objects with accusative case with very few errors.
Telegraphic speech is also very good evidence against the hypothesis that children learn sentences by imitation. Adults—even when speaking motherese—do
not drop function words when they talk to children.
The correct use of word order, case marking, and agreement rules shows that
even though children may often omit function morphemes, they are aware of
constituent structure and syntactic rules. Their utterances are not simply words
randomly strung together. From a very early stage onward, children have a grasp
of the principles of phrase and sentence formation and of the kinds of structure
dependencies mentioned in chapter 2, as revealed by these constituent structure
trees:
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
S
S
NP
Pronoun
he
NP
VP
V
play
N
NP
Adj
N
little
tune
VP
V
NP
Pronoun
Andrew
want
that
S
NP
N
VP
V
NP
N
Cathy
build
house
In order to apply morphological and syntactic rules the child must know what
syntactic categories the words in his language belong to. But how exactly does
the child come to know that play and want are verbs and tune and house are
nouns? One suggestion is that children first use the meaning of the word to
figure out its category. This is called semantic bootstrapping. The child may
have rules such as “if a word refers to a physical object, it’s a noun” or “if a
word refers to an action, it’s a verb,” and so on. However, the rules that link
certain meanings to specific categories are not foolproof. For example, the word
action denotes an action but it is not a verb, know is not an action but is a verb,
and justice is a noun though it is not a physical object. But the rules that drive
semantic bootstrapping might be helpful for the kind of words children learn
early on which tend to refer to objects and actions.
Word frames may also help the child to determine when words belong to
the same category. Studies of the language used to children show that there are
certain frames that occur frequently enough to be reliable for categorization, for
example, “you __ it” and “the __ one.” Most typically, verbs such as see, do, did,
win, fix, turned, and get occur in the first frame, while adjectives like red, big,
wrong, and light occur in the second. If a child knows that see is a verb, then he
could also deduce that all the other words appearing in the same frame are also
verbs. Like semantic bootstrapping, the distributional evidence is not foolproof.
For example, “it __ the” can frame a verb, it hit the ball, but also a preposition,
I hit it across the street. And also like semantic bootstrapping, this evidence may
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well be reliable enough to give the child a head start into the complex task of
learning the syntactic categories of words.
The most frequent frames typically consist of function words, determiners
such as the or a or pronouns like it or one. This suggests that children can learn
from function morphemes in the input even though they omit these elements in
their own speech. Indeed, comprehension studies show that children pay attention to function words. Two-year-olds respond more appropriately to grammatical commands such as Find the bird than to commands with an ungrammatically positioned function word as in Find was bird. Other studies suggest that
function morphemes such as determiners help children in word segmentation
and categorization.
Sometime between the ages of 2;6 and 3;6, a virtual language explosion
occurs. At this point it is difficult to identify distinct stages because the child
is undergoing so much development so rapidly. By the age of 3;0, most children
are consistent in their use of function morphemes. Moreover, they have begun
to produce and understand complex structures, including coordinated sentences
and embedded sentences of various kinds, such as the following:
He was stuck and I got him out.
I want this doll because she’s big.
I know what to do.
I like to play with something else.
I think she’s sick.
Look at the train Ursula bought.
I gon’ make it like a rocket to blast off with.
It’s too early for us to eat.
Past the age of 3;6 children can generally form grammatical wh questions
with the proper Aux inversion such as What can I do tomorrow? They can
produce and understand relative clauses such as This is the lion that chased the
giraffe, as well as other embedded clauses such as I know that Mommy is home.
They can use reflexive pronouns correctly such as I saw myself in the camera.
Somewhat beyond 4;0, depending on the individual, much of the adult grammar
has been acquired.
The Acquisition of Pragmatics
“Baby Blues” © Baby Blues Partnership. Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate.
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
In addition to acquiring the rules of grammar, children must learn the appropriate use of language in context, or pragmatics. The cartoon is funny because
of the inappropriateness of the interaction, showing that Zoe hasn’t completely
acquired the pragmatic “maxims of conversation” discussed in chapter 3.
Context is needed to determine the reference of pronouns. A sentence such as
“Amazingly, he loves her anyway” is uninterpretable unless both speaker and
hearer understand who the pronouns he and her refer to. If the sentence were
preceded by “I saw John and Mary kissing in the park,” then the referents of the
pronouns would be clear. Children are not always sensitive to the needs of their
interlocutors, and they may fail to establish the referents for pronouns. It is not
unusual for a three- or four-year-old (or even older children) to use pronouns out
of the blue, like the child who cries to her mother “He hit me” when mom has
no idea who did the deed.
The speaker and listener form part of the context of an utterance. The meaning of I and you depends on who is talking and who is listening, which changes
from situation to situation. Younger children (around age two) have difficulty
with the “shifting reference” of these pronouns. A typical error that children
make at this age is to refer to themselves as “you,” for example, saying “You
want to take a walk” when they mean “I want to take a walk.”
Children also show a lack of pragmatic awareness in the way they sometimes
use articles. Like pronouns, the interpretation of articles depends on context.
The definite article the, as in “the boy,” can be used felicitously only when it
is clear to speaker and hearer what boy is being discussed. In a discourse the
indefinite article a/an must be used for the first mention of a new referent, but
the definite article (or pronoun) may be used in subsequent mentions, as illustrated following:
A boy walked into the class.
He was in the wrong room.
The teacher directed the boy to the right classroom.
Children do not always respect the pragmatic rules for articles. In experimental studies, three-year-olds may use the definite article for introducing a new referent. In other words, the child tends to assume that his listener knows who he is
talking about without having established this in a linguistically appropriate way.
It may take a child several months or years to master those aspects of pragmatics that involve establishing the reference for function morphemes such as
determiners and pronouns. Other aspects of pragmatics are acquired very early.
Children in the holophrastic stage use their one-word utterances with different
illocutionary force (see page 176). The utterance “up” spoken by J. P. at sixteen
months might be a simple statement such as “The teddy is up on the shelf,” or a
request: “Pick me up.”
The Development of Auxiliaries: A Case Study
We have seen in this chapter that language acquisition involves development in
various components—the lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well
as pragmatics. These different modules interact in complex ways to chart an
overall course of language development.
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As an example, let us take the case of the English auxiliaries. As noted earlier, children in the telegraphic stage do not typically use auxiliaries such as
can, will, or do, and they often omit be and have from their utterances. Several syntactic constructions in English depend on the presence of an auxiliary,
the most central of which are questions and negative sentences. To negate a
main verb requires an auxiliary verb (or do if there isn’t one) as in the following
examples:
I don’t like this book.
I won’t read this book.
An adult does not say “I not like this book.”
Similarly, as discussed in chapter 2, English yes-no and wh questions are
formed by moving an auxiliary to precede the subject, as in the following
examples:
Can I leave now?
Do you love me?
Where should John put the book?
Although the two-year-old does not have productive control of auxiliaries,
she is able to form negative sentences and questions. During the telegraphic
stage, the child produces questions of the following sort:
Yes-No Questions
I ride train?
Mommy eggnog?
Have some?
These utterances have a rising intonation pattern typical of yes-no questions
in English, but because there are no auxiliaries, there can be no auxiliary movement. In wh questions there is also no auxiliary, but there is generally a wh
phrase that has moved to the beginning of the sentence. English-speaking children do not produce sentences such as “Cowboy doing what?” in which the wh
phrase remains in its deep structure position.
The two-year-old has an insufficient lexicon. The lack of auxiliaries means
that she cannot use a particular syntactic device associated with question formation in English—auxiliary movement. However, she has the pragmatic knowledge to make a request or ask for information, and she has the appropriate prosody, which depends on knowledge of phonology and the syntactic structure of
the question. She also knows the grammatical rule that requires wh phrases to
be in a fronted position. Many components of language must be in place to form
an adultlike question.
In languages that do not require auxiliaries to form a question, children
appear more adultlike. For example, in Dutch and Italian, the main verb
moves. Because many main verbs are acquired before auxiliaries, Dutch and
Italian children in the telegraphic stage produce questions that follow the
adult rule:
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
Dutch
En wat doen ze daar?
and what do they there
Wordt mama boos?
Weet je n kerk?
becomes mama angry
know you a church
“And what are they doing
there?”
“Is mommy angry?”
“Do you know a church?”
Italian
Cosa fanno questi
bambini?
Chando vene a mama?
what do these children
Vola cici?
flies birdie
when comes the mommy
“What are these babies
doing?”
“When is Mommy
coming?”
“Is the birdie flying?”
The Dutch and Italian children show us there is nothing intrinsically difficult
about syntactic movement rules. The delay that English-speaking children show
in producing adultlike questions may simply be because auxiliaries are acquired
later than main verbs and because English is idiosyncratic in forming questions
by moving only auxiliaries.
The lack of auxiliaries during the telegraphic stage also affects the formation
of negative sentences. During this stage the English-speaking child’s negative
sentences look like the following:
He no bite you.
Wayne not eating it.
Kathryn not go over there.
You no bring choo-choo train.
That no fish school.
Because of the absence of auxiliaries, these utterances do not look very adultlike.
However, children at this stage understand the pragmatic force of negation. The
child who says “No!” when asked to take a nap knows exactly what he means.
As children acquire the auxiliaries, they generally use them correctly; that
is, the auxiliary usually appears before the subject in yes-no questions, but not
always.
Yes-No Questions
Does the kitty stand up?
Can I have a piece of paper?
Will you help me?
We can go now?
Wh Questions
Which way they should go?
What can we ride in?
What will we eat?
The introduction of auxiliaries into the child’s grammar also affects negative
sentences. We now find correctly negated auxiliaries, though be is still missing
in many cases.
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Paul can’t have one.
Donna won’t let go.
I don’t want cover on it.
I am not a doctor.
It’s not cold.
Paul not tired.
I not crying.
The child always places the negation in the correct position in relation to the
auxiliary or be. Main verbs follow negation and be precedes negation. Children
never produce errors such as “Mommy dances not” or “I not am going.”
In languages such as French and German, which are like Italian and Dutch in
having a rule that moves inflected verbs, the verb shows up before the negative
marker. French and German children respect this rule, as follows. (In the German examples nich is the baby form of nicht.)
French
Veux pas lolo.
Marche pas.
Ça tourne pas.
want not water
walks not
that turns not
“I don’t want water.”
“She doesn’t walk.”
“That doesn’t turn.”
German
Macht nich aua.
Brauche nich lala.
Schmeckt auch nich.
makes not ouch
need not pacifier
tastes also not
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“I don’t need a pacifier.”
“It doesn’t taste good either.”
Though the stages of language development are universal, they are shaped
by the grammar of the particular adult language the child is acquiring. During the telegraphic stage, German, French, Italian, and English-speaking children omit auxiliaries, but they form negative sentences and questions in different ways because the rules of question and negative formation are different in
the respective adult languages. This tells us something essential about language
acquisition: Children are sensitive to the rules of the adult language at the earliest stages of development. Just as their phonology is quickly fine-tuned to the
ambient language(s), so is their syntactic system.
The ability of children to form complex rules and construct grammars of
the languages around them in a relatively short time is phenomenal. That all
children go through similar stages regardless of language shows that they are
equipped with special abilities to know what generalizations to look for and
what to ignore, and how to discover the regularities of language.
Setting Parameters
Children acquire some aspects of syntax very early, even while they are still in
the telegraphic stage. Most of these early developments correspond to what we
referred to as the parameters of UG in chapter 2. One such parameter determines whether the head of a phrase comes before or after its complements, for
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition
example, whether the order of the VP is verb-object (VO) as in English or OV as
in Japanese. Children produce the correct word order of their language in their
earliest multiword utterances, and they understand word order even when they
are in the one-word stage of production. According to the parameter model of
UG, the child does not actually have to formulate a word-order rule. Rather,
he must choose between two already specified values: head first or head last.
He determines the correct value based on the language he hears around him.
The English-speaking child can quickly figure out that the head comes before
its complements; a Japanese-speaking child can equally well determine that his
language is head final.
Other parameters of UG involve the verb movement rules. In some languages
the verb can move out of the VP to higher positions in the phrase structure tree.
We saw this in the Dutch and Italian questions discussed in the last section. In
other languages, such as English, verbs do not move (only auxiliaries do). The verb
movement parameters provide the child with an option: my language does/does not
allow verb movement. As we saw, Dutch- and Italian-speaking children quickly
set the verb movement parameters to the “does allow” value, and so they form
questions by moving the verb. English-speaking children never make the mistake
of moving the verb, even when they don’t yet have auxiliaries. In both cases, the
children have set the parameter at the correct value for their language. Even after
English-speaking children acquire the auxiliaries and the Aux movement rule, they
never overgeneralize this movement to include verbs. This supports the hypothesis
that the parameter is set early in development and cannot be undone. In this case
as well, the child does not have to formulate a rule of verb movement; he does not
have to learn when the verb moves and where it moves to. This is all given by UG.
He simply has to decide whether verb movement is possible in his language.
The parameters of UG limit the grammatical options to a small well-defined
set—is my language head first or head last, does my language have verb movement, and so on. Parameters greatly reduce the acquisition burden on the child
and contribute to explaining the ease and rapidity of language acquisition.
The Acquisition of Signed Languages
Deaf children who are born to deaf signing parents are naturally exposed to
sign language just as hearing children are naturally exposed to spoken language.
Given the universal aspects of sign and spoken languages, it is not surprising
that language development in these deaf children parallels the stages of spoken
language acquisition. Deaf children babble, they then progress to single signs
similar to the single words in the holophrastic stage, and finally they begin to
combine signs. There is also a telegraphic stage in which the function signs may
be omitted. Use of function signs becomes consistent at around the same age for
deaf children as function words in spoken languages. The ages at which signing
children go through each of these stages are comparable to the ages of children
acquiring a spoken language.
Both spoken and signed language acquisition adhere to a set of universal principles, overlaid by language-particular components. We saw earlier that Englishspeaking children easily acquire wh movement, which is governed by universal
principles, but they show some delay in their use of Aux movement, which is
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CHAPTER 7 Language Acquisition
specific to English. In wh questions in ASL, the wh word can move or it can be
left in its original position. Both of the following sentences are grammatical:
___________________________whq
WHO BILL SEE YESTERDAY?
___________________________ whq
BILL SAW WHO YESTERDAY?
(Note: We follow the convention of writing the glosses for signs in uppercase
letters.)
There is no Aux movement in ASL, but a question is accompanied by a facial
expression with furrowed brows and the head tilted back. This is represented
by the “whq” above the ASL glosses. This non-manual marker is part of the
grammar of ASL. It is like the rising intonation we use when we ask questions in
English and other spoken languages.
In the acquisition of wh questions in ASL, signing children easily learned the
rules associated with the wh phrase. The children sometimes move the wh phrase
and sometimes leave it in place, as adult signers do. But they often omit the nonmanual marker, an omission that is not grammatical in the adult language.
Sometimes the parallels between the acquisition of signed and spoken languages are striking. For example, some of the grammatical morphemes in ASL
are semantically transparent or iconic, that is, they look like what they mean;
for example, the sign for the pronoun “I” involves the speaker pointing to his
chest. The sign for the pronoun “you” is a point to the chest of the addressee.
As noted earlier, at around age two, children acquiring spoken languages often
reverse the pronouns “I” and “you.” Interestingly, at this same age signing children make this same error. They will point to themselves when they mean “you”
and point to the addressee when they mean “I.” Children acquiring ASL make
this error despite the transparency or iconicity of these particular signs, because
signing children (like signing adults) treat these pronouns as linguistic symbols
and not simply as pointing gestures. As part of the language, the shifting reference of these pronouns presents the same problem for signing children that it
does for speaking children.
Hearing children of deaf parents acquire both sign language and spoken language when exposed to both. Studies show that Canadian bilingual children
who acquire Langues des Signes Quebecoise (LSQ), or Quebec Sign Language,
develop the two languages exactly as bilingual children acquiring two spoken
languages. The LSQ–French bilinguals reached linguistic milestones in each of
their languages in parallel with Canadian children acquiring French and English.
They produced their first words, as well as their first word combinations, at the
same time in each language. In reaching these milestones, neither group showed
any delay compared to monolingual children.
Deaf children of hearing parents who are not exposed to sign language from
birth suffer a great handicap in acquiring language. It may be many years before
these children are able to use a spoken language or before they encounter a
conventional sign language. Yet the instinct to acquire language is so strong in
humans that these deaf children begin to develop their own manual gestures to
Knowing More Than One Language
express their thoughts and desires. A study of six such children revealed that
they not only developed individual signs but joined pairs and formed sentences
with definite syntactic order and systematic constraints. Although these “home
signs,” as they are called, are not fully developed languages like ASL or LSQ,
they have a linguistic complexity and systematicity that could not have come
from the input, because there was no input. Cases such as these demonstrate not
only the strong drive that humans have to communicate through language, but
also the innate basis of language structure.
Knowing More Than One Language
He that understands grammar in one language, understands it in another as far as
the essential properties of Grammar are concerned. The fact that he can’t speak, nor
comprehend, another language is due to the diversity of words and their various forms,
but these are the accidental properties of grammar.
ROGER BACON (1214–1294)
People can acquire a second language under many different circumstances.
You may have learned a second language when you began middle school, or
high school, or college. Moving to a new country often means acquiring a new
language. Other people live in communities or homes in which more than one
language is spoken and may acquire two (or more) languages simultaneously.
The term second language acquisition, or L2 acquisition, generally refers to the
acquisition of a second language by someone (adult or child) who has already
acquired a first language. This is also referred to as sequential bilingualism.
Bilingual language acquisition refers to the (more or less) simultaneous acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy (or before the age of three years),
also referred to as simultaneous bilingualism.
Childhood Bilingualism
© 2009 Tundra Comics
Approximately half of the people in the world are native speakers of more than
one language. This means that as children they had regular and continued
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exposure to those languages. In many parts of the world, especially in Africa
and Asia, bilingualism (even multilingualism) is the norm. In contrast, many
Western countries (though by no means all of them) view themselves as monolingual, even though they may be home to speakers of many languages. In the
United States and many European countries, bilingualism is often viewed as a
transitory phenomenon associated with immigration.
Bilingualism is an intriguing topic. People wonder how it’s possible for a child
to acquire two (or more) languages at the same time. There are many questions,
such as: Doesn’t the child confuse the two languages? Does bilingual language
development take longer than monolingual development? Are bilingual children
brighter, or does acquiring two languages negatively affect the child’s cognitive
development in some way? How much exposure to each language is necessary
for a child to become bilingual?
Much of the early research into bilingualism focused on the fact that bilingual children sometimes mix the two languages in the same sentences, as the
following examples from French-English bilingual children illustrate. In the first
example, a French word appears in an otherwise English sentence. In the other
two examples, all of the words are English but the syntax is French.
His nose is perdu.
A house pink
That’s to me.
“His nose is lost.”
“A pink house”
“That’s mine.”
In early studies of bilingualism, this kind of language mixing was viewed negatively. It was taken as an indication that the child was confused or having difficulty with the two languages. In fact, many parents, sometimes on the advice
of educators or psychologists, would stop raising their children bilingually when
faced with this issue. However, it now seems clear that some amount of language mixing is a normal part of the early bilingual acquisition process and not
necessarily an indication of any language problem.
Theories of Bilingual Development
These mixed utterances raise an interesting question about the grammars of
bilingual children. Does the bilingual child start out with only one grammar that
is eventually differentiated, or does she construct a separate grammar for each
language right from the start? The unitary system hypothesis says that the child
initially constructs only one lexicon and one grammar. The presence of mixed
utterances such as the ones just given is often taken as support for this hypothesis. In addition, at the early stages, bilingual children often have words for particular objects in only one language. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual
child may know the Spanish word for milk, leche, but not the English word, or
she may have the word water but not agua. This kind of complementarity has
also been taken as support for the idea that the child has only one lexicon.
However, careful examination of the vocabularies of bilingual children reveals
that although they may not have exactly the same words in both languages,
there is enough overlap to make the single lexicon idea implausible. The reason children may not have the same set of words in both languages is that they
use their two languages in different circumstances and acquire the vocabulary
Knowing More Than One Language
appropriate to each situation. For example, the bilingual English-Spanish child
may hear only Spanish during mealtime, and so he will first learn the Spanish
words for foods. Also, bilingual children have smaller vocabularies in each of
their languages than the monolingual child has in her one language. This makes
sense because a child can only learn so many words a day, and the bilingual
child has two lexicons to build. For these reasons the bilingual child may have
more lexical gaps than the monolingual child at a comparable stage of development, and those gaps may be different for each language.
The separate systems hypothesis says that the bilingual child builds a distinct
lexicon and grammar for each language. To test the separate systems hypothesis,
it is necessary to look at how the child acquires those pieces of grammar that are
different in his two languages. For example, if both languages have SVO word
order, this would not be a good place to test this hypothesis. Several studies have
shown that where the two languages diverge, children acquire the different rules of
each language. Spanish-English and French-German bilingual children have been
shown to use the word orders appropriate to each language, as well as the correct
agreement morphemes for each language. Other studies have found that children
set up two distinct sets of phonemes and phonological rules for their languages.
The separate systems hypothesis also receives support from the study of
the LSQ-French bilinguals discussed earlier. These children have semantically
equivalent words in the two languages, just as bilinguals acquiring two spoken languages do. In addition, these children, like all bilingual children, were
able to adjust their language choice to the language of their addressees, showing that they differentiated the two languages. Like most bilingual children, the
LSQ-French bilinguals produced mixed utterances that had words from both
languages. What is especially interesting is that these children showed simultaneous language mixing. They would produce an LSQ sign and a French word
at the same time, something that is only possible if one language is spoken and
the other signed. However, this finding has implications for bilingual language
acquisition in general. It shows that the language mixing of bilingual children
is not caused by confusion, but is rather the result of two grammars operating
simultaneously.
If bilingual children have two grammars and two lexicons, what explains the
mixed utterances? Various explanations have been offered. One suggestion is
that children mix because they have lexical gaps; if the French-English bilingual
child does not know the English word lost, she will use the word she does know,
perdu—the “any port in a storm” strategy. Another possibility is that the mixing in child language is similar to codeswitching used by many adult bilinguals
(discussed in chapter 9). In specific social situations, bilingual adults may switch
back and forth between their two languages in the same sentence, for example,
“I put the forks en las mesas” (I put the forks on the tables). Codeswitching
reflects the grammars of both languages working simultaneously; it is not “bad
grammar” or “broken English.” Adult bilinguals codeswitch only when speaking to other bilingual speakers. It has been suggested that the mixed utterances
of bilingual children are a form of codeswitching. In support of this proposal,
various studies have shown that bilingual children as young as two make contextually appropriate language choices: In speaking to monolinguals the children
use one language, and in speaking to bilinguals they mix the two languages.
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Two Monolinguals in One Head
Although we must study many bilingual children to reach any firm conclusions,
the evidence accumulated so far seems to support the idea that children construct multiple grammars from the outset. Moreover, it seems that bilingual
children develop their grammars along the same lines as monolingual children.
They go through a babbling stage, a holophrastic stage, a telegraphic stage, and
so on. During the telegraphic stage they show the same characteristics in each of
their languages as the monolingual children. For example, monolingual Englishspeaking children omit verb endings in sentences such as “Eve play there”
and “Andrew want that,” and German-speaking children use infinitives as in
“S[ch]okolade holen” (chocolate get-infinitive). Spanish- and Italian-speaking
monolinguals never omit verbal inflection or use infinitives in this way. Remarkably, two-year-old German-Italian bilinguals use infinitives when speaking German but not when they speak Italian. Young Spanish-English bilingual children
drop the English verb endings but not the Spanish ones, and German-English
bilinguals omit verbal inflection in English and use the infinitive in German.
Results such as these have led some researchers to suggest that from a grammarmaking point of view, the bilingual child is like “two monolinguals in one head.”
The Role of Input
One issue that concerns researchers studying bilingualism, as well as parents of
bilingual children, is the relationship between language input and proficiency.
What role does input play in helping the child to separate the two languages?
One input condition that is thought to promote bilingual development is une
personne–une langue (one person, one language)—as in, Mom speaks only language A to the child and Dad speaks only language B. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to
acquire each without influence from the other. Whether this method influences
bilingual development in some important way has not been established. In practice this “ideal” input situation may be difficult to attain. It may also be unnecessary. We saw earlier that babies are attuned to various phonological properties
of the input language such as prosody and phonotactics. Various studies suggest
that this sensitivity provides a sufficient basis for the bilingual child to keep the
two languages separate.
Another question is, how much input does a child need in each language to
become “native” in both? The answer is not straightforward. It seems intuitively
clear that if a child hears twelve hours of English a day and only two hours of
Spanish, he will probably develop English much more quickly and completely
than Spanish. In fact, under these conditions he may never achieve the kind of
grammatical competence in Spanish that we associate with the normal monolingual Spanish speaker. In reality, bilingual children are raised in a variety of circumstances. Some may have more or less equal exposure to the two languages;
some may hear one language more than the other but still have sufficient input
in the two languages to become “native” in both; some may ultimately have one
language that is dominant to a lesser or greater degree. Researchers simply do
not know how much language exposure is necessary in the two languages to
produce a balanced bilingual. For practical purposes, the rule of thumb is that
Knowing More Than One Language
the child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the two languages to
achieve native proficiency in both.
Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism
Bilingual Hebrew-English-speaking child: “I speak Hebrew and English.”
Monolingual English-speaking child: “What’s English?”
SOURCE UNKNOWN
Another issue is the effect of bilingualism on intellectual or cognitive development. Does being bilingual make you more or less intelligent, more or less creative, and so on? Historically, research into this question has been fraught with
methodological problems and has often been heavily influenced by the prevailing political and social climate. Many early studies (before the 1960s) showed
that bilingual children did worse than monolingual children on IQ and other
cognitive and educational tests. The results of more recent research indicate that
bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving.
Also, bilingual children seem to have better metalinguistic awareness, which
refers to a speaker’s conscious awareness about language rather than of language. This is illustrated in the epigraph to this section. Moreover, bilingual
children have an earlier understanding of the arbitrary relationship between an
object and its name. Finally, they have sufficient metalinguistic awareness to
speak the contextually appropriate language, as noted earlier.
Whether children enjoy some cognitive or educational benefit from being
bilingual seems to depend in part on extralinguistic factors such as the social
and economic position of the child’s group or community, the educational situation, and the relative “prestige” of the two languages. Studies that show the
most positive effects (e.g., better school performance) generally involve children
reared in societies where both languages are valued and whose parents were
interested and supportive of their bilingual development.
Second Language Acquisition
In contrast to the bilinguals just discussed, many people are introduced to a second language (L2) after they have achieved native competence in a first language
(L1). If you have had the experience of trying to master a second language as an
adult, no doubt you found it to be a challenge quite unlike your first language
experience.
Is L2 Acquisition the Same as L1 Acquisition?
With some exceptions, adults do not simply pick up a second language. It usually
requires conscious attention, if not intense study and memorization, to become
proficient in a second language. Again, with the exception of some remarkable
individuals, adult second-language learners (L2ers) do not often achieve nativelike grammatical competence in the L2, especially with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent, and they may make syntactic or morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language
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(L1ers). For example, L2ers often make word order errors, especially early in
their development, as well as morphological errors in grammatical gender and
case. L2 errors may fossilize so that no amount of teaching or correction can
undo them.
Unlike L1 acquisition, which is uniformly successful across children and languages, adults vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely.
Some people are very talented language learners. Others are hopeless. Most
people fall somewhere in the middle. Success may depend on a range of factors,
including age, talent, motivation, and whether you are in the country where the
language is spoken or sitting in a classroom five mornings a week with no further contact with native speakers. For all these reasons, many people, including
many linguists who study L2 acquisition, believe that second language acquisition is something different from first language acquisition. This hypothesis is
referred to as the fundamental difference hypothesis of L2 acquisition.
In certain important respects, however, L2 acquisition is like L1 acquisition. Like L1ers, L2ers do not acquire their second language overnight; they go
through stages. Like L1ers, L2ers construct grammars. These grammars reflect
their competence in the L2 at each stage, and so their language at any particular
point, though not native-like, is rule-governed and not haphazard. The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called
interlanguage grammars.
Consider word order in the interlanguage grammars of Romance (e.g., Italian,
Spanish, and Portuguese) speakers acquiring German as a second language. The
word order of the Romance languages is Subject-(Auxiliary)-Verb-Object (like
English). German has two basic word orders depending on the presence of an
auxiliary. Sentences with auxiliaries have Subject-Auxiliary-Object-Verb, as in
(1). Sentences without auxiliaries have Subject-Verb-Object, as in (2). (Note that
as with the child data above, these L2 sentences may contain various “errors” in
addition to the word order facts we are considering.)
1.
2.
Hans hat ein Buch gekauft.
Hans kauft ein Buch.
“Hans has a book bought.”
“Hans is buying a book.”
Studies show that Romance speakers acquire German word order in pieces.
During the first stage they use German words but the S-Aux-V-O word order of
their native language, as follows:
Stage 1:
Mein Vater hat gekauft ein Buch.
“My father has bought a book.”
At the second stage, they acquired the VP word order Object-Verb.
Stage 2:
Vor Personalrat auch meine helfen.
in the personnel office [a colleague] me helped
“A colleague in the personnel office helped me.”
At the third stage they acquired the rule that places the verb or (auxiliary) in
second position.
Knowing More Than One Language
Stage 3:
Jetzt kann sie mir eine Frage machen.
now can she me a question ask
“Now she can ask me a question.”
I kenne nich die Welt.
I know not the world.
“I don’t know the world.”
These stages differ from those of children acquiring German as a first language.
For example, German children know early on that the language has SOV word
order.
Like L1ers, L2ers also attempt to uncover the grammar of the target language,
but with varying success, and they often do not reach the target. Proponents of
the fundamental difference hypothesis believe that L2ers construct grammars
according to different principles than those used in L1 acquisition, principles
that are not specifically designed for language acquisition, but for the problemsolving skills used for tasks like playing chess or learning math. According to
this view, L2ers lack access to the specifically linguistic principles of UG that
L1ers have to help them.
Opposing this view, others have argued that adults are superior to children
in solving all sorts of nonlinguistic problems. If they were using these problemsolving skills to learn their L2, shouldn’t they be uniformly more successful than
they are? Also, linguistic savants such as Christopher, discussed in the introduction, argue against the view that L2 acquisition involves only nonlinguistic cognitive abilities. Christopher’s IQ and problem-solving skills are minimal at best,
yet he has become proficient in several languages.
Many L2 acquisition researchers do not believe that L2 acquisition is fundamentally different from L1 acquisition. They point to various studies that
show that interlanguage grammars do not generally violate principles of UG,
which makes the process seem more similar to L1 acquisition. In the German L2
examples above, the interlanguage rules may be wrong for German, or wrong
for Romance, but they are not impossible rules. These researchers also note that
although L2ers may fall short of L1ers in terms of their final grammar, they
appear to acquire rules in the same way as L1ers.
Native Language Influence in L2 Acquisition
One respect in which L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are clearly different is
that adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language.
As discussed in chapter 6, linguistic competence is unconscious knowledge. We
cannot suppress our ability to use the rules of our language. We cannot decide
not to understand English. Similarly, L2ers—especially at the beginning stages
of acquiring their L2—seem to rely on their L1 grammar to some extent. This
is shown by the kinds of errors L2ers make, which often involve the transfer of
grammatical rules from their L1. This is most obvious in phonology. L2ers generally speak with an accent because they may transfer the phonemes, phonological rules, or syllable structures of their first language to their second language.
We see this in the Japanese speaker, who does not distinguish between write
[raɪt] and light [laɪt] because the r/l distinction is not phonemic in Japanese; in
the French speaker, who says “ze cat in ze hat” because French does not have [ð];
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in the German speaker, who devoices final consonants, saying [hӕf] for have;
and in the Spanish speaker, who inserts a schwa before initial consonant clusters, as in [ǝskul] for school and [ǝsnab] for snob.
Similarly, English speakers may have difficulty with unfamiliar sounds in
other languages. For example, in Italian long (or double) consonants are phonemic. Italian has minimal pairs such as the following:
ano
pala
dita
“anus”
“shovel”
“fingers”
anno
palla
ditta
“year”
“ball”
“company”
English-speaking L2 learners of Italian have difficulty in hearing and producing the contrast between long and short consonants. This can lead to very
embarrassing situations, for example on New Year’s Eve, when instead of wishing people buon anno (good year), you wish them buon ano.
Native language influence is also found in the syntax and morphology. Sometimes this influence shows up as a wholesale transfer of a particular piece of
grammar. For example, a Spanish speaker acquiring English might drop subjects
in nonimperative sentences because this is possible in Spanish, as illustrated by
the following examples:
Hey, is not funny.
In here have the mouth.
Live in Colombia.
Or speakers may begin with the word order of their native language, as we
saw in the Romance-German interlanguage examples.
Native language influence may show up in more subtle ways. For example,
people whose L1 is German acquire English yes-no questions faster than Japanese speakers do. This is because German has a verb movement rule for forming
yes-no questions that is very close to the English Aux movement rule, while in
Japanese there is no syntactic movement in question formation.
The Creative Component of L2 Acquisition
It would be an oversimplification to think that L2 acquisition involves only the
transfer of L1 properties to the L2 interlanguage. There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. Many language-particular parts of the L1 grammar do
not transfer. Items that a speaker considers irregular, infrequent, or semantically
difficult are not likely to transfer to the L2. For example, speakers will not typically transfer L1 idioms such as He hit the roof meaning “He got angry.” They
are more likely to transfer structures in which the semantic relations are transparent. For example, a structure such as (1) will transfer more readily than (2).
1.
2.
It is awkward to carry this suitcase.
This suitcase is awkward to carry.
In (1) the NP “this suitcase” is in its logical direct object position, while in (2) it
has been moved to the subject position away from the verb that selects it.
Knowing More Than One Language
Many of the “errors” that L2ers do make are not derived from their L1. For
example, in one study Turkish speakers at a particular stage in their development
of German used S-V-Adv (Subject-Verb-Adverb) word order in embedded clauses
(the wenn clause in the following example) in their German interlanguage, even
though both their native language and the target language have S-Adv-V order:
Wenn
if
ich
I
geh
go
zuruck
back,
ich
I
arbeit elektriker
work (as an) electrician
in der Türkei.
in Turkey
(Cf. Wenn ich zuruck geh ich arbeit elektriker, which is grammatically correct German.)
The embedded S-V-Adv order is most likely an overgeneralization of the verbsecond requirement in German main clauses. As we noted earlier, overgeneralization is a clear indication that a rule has been acquired.
Why certain L1 rules transfer to the interlanguage grammar and others don’t
is not well understood. It is clear, however, that although construction of the L2
grammar is influenced by the L1 grammar, developmental principles—possibly
universal—also operate in L2 acquisition. This is best illustrated by the fact that
speakers with different L1s go through similar L2 stages. For example, Turkish,
Serbo-Croatian, Italian, Greek, and Spanish speakers acquiring German as an
L2 all drop articles to some extent. Because some of these L1s have articles, this
cannot be caused by transfer but must involve some more general property of
language acquisition.
Is There a Critical Period for L2 Acquisition?
I don’t know how you manage, Sir, amongst all the foreigners; you never know what they
are saying. When the poor things first come here they gabble away like geese, although
the children can soon speak well enough.
MARGARET ATWOOD, Alias Grace, 1996
Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when
exposed to a second language, the more likely she is to achieve native-like
competence.
In an important study of the effects of age on ultimate attainment in L2 acquisition, Jacqueline Johnson and Elissa Newport tested several groups of Chinese
and Korean speakers who had acquired English as a second language. The subjects, all of whom had been in the United States for at least five years, were
tested on their knowledge of specific aspects of English morphology and syntax.
They were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences such as:
The little boy is speak to a policeman.
The farmer bought two pig.
A bat flewed into our attic last night.
Johnson and Newport found that the test results depended heavily on the age
at which the person had arrived in the United States. The people who arrived as
children (between the age of three and eight) did as well on the test as American
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native speakers. Those who arrived between the ages of eight and fifteen did not
perform like native speakers. Moreover, every year seemed to make a difference
for this group. The person who arrived at age nine did better than the one who
arrived at age ten; those who arrived at age eleven did better than those who
arrived at age twelve, and so on. The group that arrived between the ages of
seventeen and thirty-one had the lowest scores.
Does this mean that there is a critical period for L2 acquisition, an age beyond
which it is impossible to acquire the grammar of a new language? Most researchers would hesitate to make such a strong claim. Although age is an important
factor in achieving native-like L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire
a second language as an adult. Many teenage and adult L2 learners become proficient, and a few highly talented ones even manage to pass for native speakers.
Also, the Newport and Johnson studies looked at the end state of L2 acquisition, after their subjects had been in an English-speaking environment for many
years. It is possible that the ultimate attainment of adult L2ers falls short of
native competence, but that the process of L2 acquisition is not fundamentally
different from L1 acquisition.
It is more appropriate to say that L2 acquisition abilities gradually decline with
age and that there are “sensitive periods” for the native-like mastery of certain
aspects of the L2. The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest. To achieve
native-like pronunciation of an L2 generally requires exposure during childhood.
Other aspects of language, such as syntax, may have a larger window.
Recent research with learners of their “heritage language” (the ancestral language not learned as a child, such as Gaelic in Ireland) provides additional support for the notion of sensitive periods in L2 acquisition. This finding is based
on studies into the acquisition of Spanish by college students who had overheard the language as children (and sometimes knew a few words), but who did
not otherwise speak or understand Spanish. The overhearers were compared to
people who had no exposure to Spanish before the age of fourteen. All of the
students were native speakers of English studying their heritage language as a
second language. These results showed that the overhearers acquired a more
native-like accent than the other students did. However, the overhearers did not
show any advantage in acquiring the grammatical morphemes of Spanish. Early
exposure may leave an imprint that facilitates the late acquisition of certain
aspects of language.
Recent research on the neurological effects of acquiring a second language
shows that left hemisphere cortical density is increased in bilinguals relative
to monolinguals and that this increase is more pronounced in early versus late
second-language learners. The study also shows a positive relationship between
brain density and second-language proficiency. The researchers conclude that
the structure of the human brain is altered by the experience of acquiring a second language.
Summary
When children acquire a language, they acquire the grammar of that language—the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules. They
also acquire the pragmatic rules of the language as well as a lexicon. Children
Summary
are not taught language. Rather, they extract the rules (and much of the lexicon)
from the language around them.
Several learning mechanisms have been suggested to explain the acquisition
process. Imitations of adult speech, reinforcement, and analogy have all been
proposed. None of these possible learning mechanisms account for the fact that
children creatively form new sentences according to the rules of their language,
or for the fact that children make certain kinds of errors but not others. Empirical studies of the motherese hypothesis show that grammar development does
not depend on structured input. Connectionist models of acquisition also depend
on the child having specially structured input.
The ease and rapidity of children’s language acquisition and the uniformity of
the stages of development for all children and all languages, despite the poverty
of the stimulus they receive, suggest that the language faculty is innate and that
the infant comes to the complex task already endowed with a Universal Grammar. UG is not a grammar like the grammar of English or Arabic, but represents
the principles to which all human languages conform. Language acquisition is a
creative process. Children create grammars based on the linguistic input and are
guided by UG.
Language development proceeds in stages, which are universal. During the
first year of life, children develop the sounds of their language. They begin by
producing and perceiving many sounds that do not exist in their language input,
the babbling stage. Gradually, their productions and perceptions are fine-tuned
to the environment. Children’s late babbling has all the phonological characteristics of the input language. Deaf children who are exposed at birth to sign languages also produce manual babbling, showing that babbling is a universal first
stage in language acquisition that is dependent on the linguistic input received.
At the end of the first year, children utter their first words. During the second
year, they learn many more words and they develop much of the phonological
system of the language. Children’s first utterances are one-word “sentences” (the
holophrastic stage).
Many experimental studies show that children are sensitive to various linguistic properties such as stress and phonotactic constraints, and to statistical
regularities of the input that enable them to segment the fluent speech that they
hear into words. One method of segmenting speech is prosodic bootstrapping.
Other bootstrapping methods can help the child to learn verb meaning based
on syntactic context (syntactic bootstrapping), or syntactic categories based on
word meaning (semantic bootstrapping) and distributional evidence such as
word frames.
After a few months, the child puts two or more words together. These early
sentences are not random combinations of words—the words have definite patterns and express both syntactic and semantic relationships. During the telegraphic stage, the child produces longer sentences that often lack function or
grammatical morphemes. The child’s early grammar still lacks many of the rules
of the adult grammar, but is not qualitatively different from it. Children at this
stage have correct word order and rules for agreement and case, which show
their knowledge of structure.
Children make specific kinds of errors while acquiring their language. For
example, they will overgeneralize morphology by saying bringed or mans. This
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shows that they are acquiring rules of their particular language. Children never
make errors that violate principles of Universal Grammar.
In acquiring the lexicon of the language children may overextend word meaning by using dog to mean any four-legged creature. As well, they may underextend word meaning and use dog only to denote the family pet and no other dogs,
as if it were a proper noun. Despite these categorization “errors,” children’s word
learning, like their grammatical development, is guided by general principles.
Deaf children exposed to sign language show the same stages of language
acquisition as hearing children exposed to spoken languages. That all children go
through similar stages regardless of language shows that they are equipped with
special abilities to know what generalizations to look for and what to ignore,
and how to discover the regularities of language, irrespective of the modality in
which their language is expressed.
Children may acquire more than one language at a time. Bilingual children
seem to go through the same stages as monolingual children except that they
develop two grammars and two lexicons simultaneously. This is true for children acquiring two spoken languages as well as for children acquiring a spoken
language and a sign language. Whether the child will be equally proficient in the
two languages depends on the input he or she receives and the social conditions
under which the languages are acquired.
In second language acquisition, L2 learners construct grammars of the target language—called interlanguage grammars—that go through stages, like the
grammars of first-language learners. Influence from the speaker’s first language
makes L2 acquisition appear different from L1 acquisition. Adults often do not
achieve native-like competence in their L2, especially in pronunciation. The
difficulties encountered in attempting to learn languages after puberty may be
because there are sensitive periods for L2 acquisition. Some theories of second
language acquisition suggest that the same principles operate that account for
first language acquisition. A second view suggests that the acquisition of a second language in adulthood involves general learning mechanisms rather than
the specifically linguistic principles used by the child.
The universality of the language acquisition process, the stages of development, and the relatively short period in which the child constructs a complex
grammatical system without overt teaching suggest that the human species is
innately endowed with special language acquisition abilities and that language is
biologically and genetically part of the human neurological system.
All normal children learn whatever language or languages they are exposed
to, from Afrikaans to Zuni. This ability is not dependent on race, social class,
geography, or even intelligence (within a normal range). This ability is uniquely
human.
References for Further Reading
Brown, R. 1973. A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clark, E. 2002. First language acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Guasti, M. T. 2002. Language acquisition: The growth of grammar. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Exercises
Hakuta, K. 1986. Mirror of language: The debate on bilingualism. New York: Basic
Books.
Ingram, D. 1989. First language acquisition: Method, description and explanation.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jakobson, R. 1971. Studies on child language and aphasia. The Hague: Mouton.
Klima, E. S., and U. Bellugi. 1979. The signs of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
O’Grady, W. 2005. How children learn language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
White, L. 2003. Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Exercises
1. Baby talk is a term used to label the word forms that many adults use
when speaking to children. Examples in English are choo-choo for “train”
and bow-wow for “dog.” Baby talk seems to exist in every language and
culture. At least two things seem to be universal about baby talk: The
words that have baby-talk forms fall into certain semantic categories (e.g.,
food and animals), and the words are phonetically simpler than the adult
forms (e.g., “tummy” /tʌmi/ for “stomach” /stʌmɪk/). List all the baby-talk
words you can think of in your native language; then (1) separate them into
semantic categories, and (2) try to state general rules for the kinds of phonological reductions or simplifications that occur.
2. In this chapter we discussed the way children acquire rules of question
formation. The following examples of children’s early questions are from a
stage that is later than those discussed in the chapter. Formulate a generalization to describe this stage.
Can I go?
Why do you have one tooth?
What do frogs eat?
Do you like chips?
Can I can’t go?
Why you don’t have a tongue?
What do you don’t like?
Do you don’t like bananas?
3. Find a child between two and four years old and play with the child for
about thirty minutes. Keep a list of all words and/or “sentences” that are
used inappropriately. Describe what the child’s meanings for these words
probably are. Describe the syntactic or morphological errors (including
omissions). If the child is producing multiword sentences, write a grammar
that could account for the data you have collected.
4. Roger Brown and his coworkers at Harvard University studied the language development of three children, referred to in the literature as Adam,
Eve, and Sarah. The following are samples of their utterances during the
“two-word stage.”
see boy
see sock
pretty boat
push it
move it
mommy sleep
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pretty fan
bye bye melon
more taxi
bye bye hot
more melon
A. Assume that these utterances are grammatical sentences in the children’s grammars.
(1) Write a minigrammar that would account for these sentences.
Example: One rule might be: VP → V N
(2) Draw phrase structure trees for each utterance.
Example:
VP
V
N
see
boy
B. One observation made by Brown was that many of the sentences and
phrases produced by the children were ungrammatical from the point
of view of the adult grammar. The research group concluded, based on
utterances such as those below, that a rule in the children’s grammar for
a noun phrase was:
NP → M N (where M = any modifier)
A coat
My stool
Poor man
A celery
That knee
Little top
A Becky
More coffee
Dirty knee
A hands
More nut
That Adam
My mummy
Two tinker-toy
Big boot
(3) Mark with an asterisk any of the above NPs that are ungrammatical
in the adult grammar of English.
(4) State the “violation” for each starred item.
For example, if one of the utterances were Lotsa book, you might say:
“The modifier lotsa must be followed by a plural noun.”
5. In the holophrastic (one-word) stage of child language acquisition, the
child’s phonological system differs in systematic ways from that in the adult
grammar. The inventory of sounds and the phonemic contrasts are smaller,
and there are greater constraints on phonotactic rules. (See chapter 5 for a
discussion of these aspects of phonology.)
A. For each of the following words produced by a child, state what the
substitution is, and any other differences that result.
Example:
spook [pʰuk] Substitution: initial cluster [sp] reduced to single consonant; /p/ becomes aspirated, showing that child has acquired
aspiration rule.
Exercises
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
(10)
(11)
(12)
don’t
skip
shoe
that
play
thump
bath
chop
kitty
light
dolly
grow
[dot]
[kʰɪp]
[su]
[dæt]
[pʰe]
[dʌp]
[bæt]
[tʰap]
[kɪdi]
[waɪt]
[daʊi]
[go]
B. State general rules that account for the children’s deviations from the
adult pronunciations.
6. Children learn demonstrative words such as this, that, these, those; temporal terms such as now, then, tomorrow; and spatial terms such as here,
there, right, and behind relatively late. What do all these words have in
common? (Hint: See the pragmatics section of chapter 3.) Why might that
factor delay their acquisition?
7.
We saw in this chapter how children overgeneralize rules such as the plural
rule, producing forms such as mans or mouses. What might a child learning English use instead of the adult words given?
a. children
b. went
c. better
d. best
e. brought
f. sang
g. geese
h. worst
i. knives
j. worse
8. The following words are from the lexicons of two children ages one year
six months (1;6) and two (2;0) years old. Compare the pronunciation of the
words to adult pronunciation.
Child 1 (1;6)
soap
feet
sock
goose
dish
[doʊp]
[bit]
[kak]
[gos]
[dɪtʃ]
Child 2 (2;0)
bib
slide
dog
cheese
shoes
[bɛ]
[daɪ]
[da]
[tʃis]
[dus]
light
sock
geese
fish
sheep
[waɪt]
[sʌk]
[gis]
[fɪs]
[ʃip]
bead
pig
cheese
biz
bib
[biː]
[pɛk]
[tis]
[bɪs]
[bɪp]
a. What happens to final consonants in the language of these two children? Formulate the rule(s) in words. Do all final consonants behave
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the same way? If not, which consonants undergo the rule(s)? Is this a
natural class?
b. On the basis of these data, do any pairs of words allow you to identify
any of the phonemes in the grammars of these children? What are they?
Explain how you were able to determine your answer.
9.
Make up a “wug test” to test a child’s knowledge of the following
morphemes:
comparative
superlative
progressive
agentive
-er
-est
-ing
-er
(as in bigger)
(as in biggest)
(as in I am dancing)
(as in writer)
10. Children frequently produce sentences such as the following:
Don’t giggle me.
I danced the clown.
Yawny Baby—you can push her mouth open to drink her.
Who deaded my kitty cat?
Are you gonna nice yourself?
a. How would you characterize the difference between the grammar or
lexicon of children who produce such sentences and adult English?
b. Can you think of similar, but well-formed, examples in adult English?
11. Many Arabic speakers tend to insert a vowel in their pronunciation of
English words. The first column has examples from L2ers whose L1 is
Egyptian Arabic and the second column from L2ers who speak Iraqi Arabic (consider [tʃ] to be a single consonant):
L1 = Egyptian Arabic
L1 = Iraqi Arabic
[bilastik]
[θiriː]
[tiransilet]
[silaɪd]
[firɛd]
[tʃildiren]
[ifloːr]
[ibleːn]
[tʃilidren]
[iθriː]
[istadi]
[ifrɛd]
plastic
three
translate
slide
Fred
children
floor
plane
children
three
study
Fred
a. What vowel do the Egyptian Arabic speakers insert and where?
b. What vowel do the Iraqi Arabic speakers insert and where?
c. Based on the position of the italicized epenthetic vowel in “I wrote to
him,” can you guess which list, A or B, belongs to Egyptian Arabic and
which belongs to Iraqi Arabic?
Arabic A
kitabta
kitabla
kitabitla
Arabic B
“I wrote him”
“He wrote to him”
“I wrote to him”
katabtu
katablu
katabtilu
“I wrote him”
“He wrote to him”
“I wrote to him”
12. Following is a list of utterances recorded from Sammy at age two-and-ahalf:
Exercises
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
m.
n.
o.
p.
q.
r.
s.
t.
u.
v.
w.
x.
y.
Mikey not see him.
Where ball go?
Look Mommy, doggie.
Big doggie.
He no bite ya.
He eats mud.
Kitty hiding.
Grampie wear glasses.
He funny.
He loves hamburgers.
Daddy ride bike.
That’s mines.
That my toy.
Him sleeping.
Want more milk.
Read moon book.
Me want that.
Teddy up.
Daddy ’puter.
’Puter broke.
Cookies and milk!!!
Me Superman.
Mommy’s angry.
Allgone kitty.
Here my batball.
A.
B.
C.
D.
What stage of language development is Sammy in?
Calculate the number of morphemes in each of Sammy’s utterances.
What is Sammy’s MLU in morphemes? In words?
Challenge question: Deciding the morpheme count for several of Sammy’s words requires some thought. For each of the following, determine
whether it should count as one or two morphemes and why.
allgone
batball
glasses
cookies
13. The following sentences were uttered by children in the telegraphic stage
(the second column contains a word-by-word gloss, and the last column is a
translation of the sentence that includes elements that the child omitted):
Child’s utterance
Gloss
Translation
Swedish
Se, blomster har
look flowers have
English
French
Tickles me
Mange du pain
eat some bread
German
S[ch]okolade holen
chocolate get
“Look, (I) have
flowers.”
“It tickles me.”
“S/he eats some
bread.”
“I/we get chocolate.”
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Dutch
Earst kleine
boekje lezen
first little book read
“First, I/we read a
little book.”
In each of the children’s sentences, the subject is missing, although this is
not grammatical in the respective adult languages (in contrast to languages
such as Spanish and Italian in which it is grammatical to omit the subject).
a. Develop two hypotheses as to why the child might omit sentence subjects during this stage. For example, one hypothesis might be “children
are limited in the length of sentences they can produce, so they drop
subjects.”
b. Evaluate the different hypotheses. For example, an objection to the
hypothesis given in (a) might be “If length is the relevant factor, why do
children consistently drop subjects but not objects?”
8
Language Processing:
Humans and Computers
No doubt a reasonable model of language use will incorporate, as a basic component, the
generative grammar that expresses the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of the language; but
this generative grammar does not, in itself, prescribe the character or functioning of a
perceptual model or a model of speech production.
NOAM CHOMSKY, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965
The Human Mind at Work:
Human Language Processing
Psycholinguistics is the area of linguistics that is concerned with linguistic performance—how we use our linguistic competence—in speech (or sign) production and comprehension. The human brain is able not only to acquire and store
the mental lexicon and grammar, but also to access that linguistic storehouse to
speak and understand language in real time.
How we process knowledge depends largely on the nature of that knowledge.
If, for example, language were not open-ended, and were merely a finite store
of fixed phrases and sentences in memory, then speaking might simply consist
of finding a sentence that expresses a thought we wished to convey. Comprehension could be the reverse—matching the sounds to a stored string that has
been memorized with its meaning. Of course, this is ridiculous! It is not possible
because of the creativity of language. In chapter 7, we saw that children do not
learn language by imitating and storing sentences, but by constructing a grammar. When we speak, we access our lexicon to find the words, and we use the
rules of grammar to construct novel sentences and to produce the sounds that
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Speaker
Listener
Sensory nerves
Ear
Brain
Brain
Feedback link
Vocal
muscles
Sensory
nerves
Motor
nerves
Sound waves
Ear
Linguistic
level
Physiological
level
Acoustic
level
Physiological
level
Linguistic
level
FIGURE 8.1 | The speech chain.1 A spoken utterance starts as a message in the
speaker’s brain/mind. It is put into linguistic form and interpreted as articulation
commands, emerging as an acoustic signal. The signal is processed by the listener’s ear
and sent to the brain/mind, where it is interpreted.
express the message we wish to convey. When we listen to speech and understand what is being said, we also access the lexicon and grammar to assign a
structure and meaning to the sounds we hear.
Speaking and comprehending speech can be viewed as a speech chain, a kind
of “brain-to-brain” linking, as shown in Figure 8.1.
The grammar relates sounds and meanings, and contains the units and rules
of the language that make speech production and comprehension possible. However, other psychological processes are used to produce and understand utterances. Certain mechanisms enable us to break the continuous stream of speech
sounds into linguistic units such as phonemes, syllables, and words in order to
comprehend, and to compose sounds into words in order to produce meaningful
speech. Other mechanisms determine how we pull words from the mental lexi1The
figure is taken from P. B. Denes and E. N. Pinson, eds. 1963. The Speech Chain.
Philadelphia, PA: Williams & Wilkins, p. 4. Reprinted with permission of Alcatel-Lucent
USA Inc.
The Human Mind at Work: Human Language Processing
con, and still others explain how we construct a phrase structure representation
of the words we retrieve.
We usually have no difficulty understanding or producing sentences in
our language. We do it without effort or conscious awareness of the processes
involved. However, we have all had the experience of making a speech error, of
having a word on the “tip of our tongue,” or of failing to understand a perfectly
grammatical sentence, such as sentence (1):
1.
The horse raced past the barn fell.
Many individuals, on hearing this sentence, will judge it to be ungrammatical, yet will judge as grammatical a sentence with the same syntactic structure,
such as:
2.
The bus driven past the school stopped.
Similarly, people will have no problem with sentence (3), which has the same
meaning as (1).
3.
The horse that was raced past the barn fell.
Conversely, some ungrammatical sentences are easily understandable, such
as sentence (4). This mismatch between grammaticality and interpretability tells
us that language processing involves more than grammar.
4.
*The baby seems sleeping.
A theory of linguistic performance tries to detail the psychological mechanisms that work with the grammar to facilitate language production and
comprehension.
Comprehension
“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would
seem to be’—or, if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be
otherwise than what it might appear to others . . . to be otherwise.’ ”
“I think I should understand that better,” Alice said very politely, “if I had it written down:
but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.”
LEWIS CARROLL, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
The sentence uttered by the Duchess provides another example of a grammatical
sentence that is difficult to understand. The sentence is very long and contains
several words that require extra resources to process, for example, multiple uses
of negation and words like otherwise. Alice notes that if she had a pen and paper
she could “unpack” this sentence more easily. One of the aims of psycholinguistics is to describe the processes people normally use in speaking and understanding language. The various breakdowns in performance, such as tip of the tongue
phenomena, speech errors, and failure to comprehend tricky sentences, can tell us
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a great deal about how the language processor works, just as children’s acquisition errors tell us a lot about the mechanisms involved in language development.
The Speech Signal
Understanding a sentence involves analysis at many levels. To begin with, we
must comprehend the individual speech sounds we hear. We are not conscious
of the complicated processes we use to understand speech any more than we are
conscious of the complicated processes of digesting food and utilizing nutrients.
We must study these processes deliberately and scientifically. One of the first
questions of linguistic performance concerns segmentation of the acoustic signal. To understand this process, some knowledge of the signal can be helpful.
In chapter 4 we described speech sounds according to the ways in which they
are produced. These involve the position of the tongue, the lips, and the velum;
the state of the vocal cords; whether the articulators obstruct the free flow of
air; and so on. All of these articulatory characteristics are reflected in the physical characteristics of the sounds produced.
Speech sounds can also be described in physical, or acoustic, terms. Physically, a sound is produced whenever there is a disturbance in the position of
air molecules. The ancient philosophers asked whether a sound is produced if
a tree falls in the middle of the forest with no one to hear it. This question has
been answered by the science of acoustics. Objectively, a sound is produced;
subjectively, there is no sound. In fact, there are sounds we cannot hear because
our ears are not sensitive to the full range of frequencies. Acoustic phonetics is
concerned only with speech sounds, all of which can be heard by the normal
human ear.
When we push air out of the lungs through the glottis, it causes the vocal
cords to vibrate; this vibration in turn produces pulses of air that escape through
the mouth (and sometimes the nose). These pulses are actually small variations
in the air pressure caused by the wavelike motion of the air molecules.
The sounds we produce can be described in terms of how fast the variations
of the air pressure occur. This determines the fundamental frequency of the
sounds and is perceived by the hearer as pitch. We can also describe the magnitude, or intensity, of the variations, which determines the loudness of the sound.
The quality of the speech sound—whether it’s an [i] or an [a] or whatever—is
determined by the shape of the vocal tract when air is flowing through it. This
shape modulates the fundamental frequency into a spectrum of frequencies of
greater or lesser intensity, and the particular combination of “greater or lesser”
is heard as a particular sound. (Imagine smooth ocean waves with regular peaks
and troughs approaching a rocky coastline. As they crash upon the rocks they
are “modulated” or broken up into dozens of “sub-waves” with varying peaks
and troughs. That is similar to what is happening to the glottal pulses as they
“crash” through the vocal tract.)
An important tool in acoustic research is a computer program that decomposes the speech signal into its frequency components. When speech is fed into
a computer (from a microphone or a recording), an image of the speech signal
is displayed. The patterns produced are called spectrograms or, more vividly,
voiceprints. A spectrogram of the words heed, head, had, and who’d is shown in
Figure 8.2.
The Human Mind at Work: Human Language Processing
FIGURE 8.2 | A spectrogram of the words heed, head, had, and who’d, spoken with a
British accent (speaker: Peter Ladefoged, February 16, 1973).
Courtesy of Peter Ladefoged.
Time in milliseconds moves horizontally from left to right on the x axis; on
the y axis the graph represents pitch (or, more technically, frequency). The intensity of each frequency component is indicated by the degree of darkness: the
more intense, the darker. Each vowel is characterized by dark bands that differ
in their placement according to their frequency. They represent the strongest
harmonics (or sub-waves) produced by the shape of the vocal tract and are called
the formants of the vowels. (A harmonic is a special frequency that is a multiple
(2, 3, etc.) of the fundamental frequency.) Because the tongue is in a different
position for each vowel, the formant frequencies differ for each vowel. The frequencies of these formants account for the different vowel qualities you hear.
The spectrogram also shows, although not very conspicuously, the pitch of the
entire utterance (intonation contour) on the voicing bar marked P. The striations
are the thin vertical lines that indicate a single opening and closing of the vocal
cords. When the striations are far apart, the vocal cords are vibrating slowly
and the pitch is low; when the striations are close together, the vocal cords are
vibrating rapidly and the pitch is high.
By studying spectrograms of all speech sounds and many different utterances,
acoustic phoneticians have learned a great deal about the basic acoustic components that reflect the articulatory features of speech sounds.
Speech Perception and Comprehension
Do what you know and perception is converted into character.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882)
Speech is a continuous signal. In natural speech, sounds overlap and influence
each other, and yet listeners have the impression that they are hearing discrete
units such as words, morphemes, syllables, and phonemes. A central problem of
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speech perception is to explain how listeners carve up the continuous speech signal into meaningful units. This is referred to as the “segmentation problem.”
Another question is, how does the listener manage to recognize particular
speech sounds when they occur in different contexts and when they are spoken
by different people? For example, how can a speaker tell that a [d] spoken by a
man with a deep voice is the same unit of sound as the [d] spoken in the highpitched voice of a child? Acoustically, they are distinct. In addition, a [d] that
occurs before the vowel [i] is somewhat acoustically different from a [d] that
occurs before the vowel [u]. How does a listener know that two physically distinct instances of a sound are the same? This is referred to as the “lack of invariance problem.”
In addressing the latter problem, experimental results show that listeners can
calibrate their perceptions to control for differences in the size and shape of the
vocal tract of the speaker. Similarly, listeners adjust how they interpret timing
information in the speech signal as a function of how quickly the speaker is talking. These normalization procedures enable the listener to understand a [d] as a
[d] regardless of the speaker or the speech rate. More complicated adjustments
are required to factor out the effects of a preceding or following sound.
As we might expect, the units we can perceive depend on the language we
know. Speakers of English can perceive the difference between [l] and [r] because
these phones represent distinct phonemes in the language. Speakers of Japanese
have great difficulty in differentiating the two because they are allophones of
one phoneme in their language. Recall from our discussion of language development in chapter 7 that these perceptual biases develop during the first year of
life.
Returning to the segmentation problem, spoken words are seldom surrounded
by boundaries such as pauses. Nevertheless, words are obviously units of perception. The spaces between them in writing support this view. How do we find
the words in the speech stream?
Suppose you heard someone say:
A sniggle blick is procking a slar.
and you were able to perceive the sounds as
[ə s n ɪ g ə l b l ɪ k ɪ z pʰ r a k ɪ ̃ ŋ ə s l a r]
You would still be unable to assign a meaning to the sounds, because the meaning of a sentence relies mainly on the meaning of its words, and the only English
lexical items in this string are the morphemes a, is, and -ing. The sentence lacks
any English content words. (However, you would accept it as grammatically
well-formed because it conforms to the rules of English syntax.)
You can decide that the sentence has no meaning only if you attempt (unconsciously or consciously) to search your mental lexicon for the phonological
strings you decide are possible words. This process is called lexical access, or
word recognition, discussed in detail later. Finding that there are no entries for
sniggle, blick, prock, and slar, you can conclude that the sentence contains nonsense strings. The segmentation and search of these “words” relies on knowing
the grammatical morphemes and the syntax.
The Human Mind at Work: Human Language Processing
If instead you heard someone say
The cat chased the rat
and you perceived the sounds as
[ð ə kʰ æ ʔ tʃʰ e s t ð ə r æ t]
a similar lexical look-up process would lead you to conclude that an event concerning a cat, a rat, and the activity of chasing had occurred. You could know
this only by segmenting the words in the continuous speech signal, analyzing
them into their phonological word units, and matching these units to similar
strings stored in your lexicon, which also includes the meanings attached to
these phonological representations. (This still would not enable you to understand who chased whom, because that requires syntactic analysis.)
Stress and intonation provide some clues to syntactic structure. We know, for
example, that the different meanings of the sentences He lives in the white house
and He lives in the White House can be signaled by differences in their stress
patterns. Such prosodic aspects of speech also help to segment the speech signal
into words and phrases. For example, syllables at the end of a phrase are longer
in duration than at the beginning, and intonation contours mark boundaries of
clauses.
Bottom-up and Top-down Models
I have experimented and experimented until now I know that [water] never does run
uphill, except in the dark. I know it does in the dark, because the pool never goes dry;
which it would, of course, if the water didn’t come back in the night. It is best to prove
things by experiment; then you know; whereas if you depend on guessing and supposing
and conjecturing, you will never get educated.
MARK TWAIN, Eve’s Diary, 1906
In this laboratory the only one who is always right is the cat.
MOTTO IN THE LABORATORY OF ARTURO ROSENBLUETH
Language comprehension is very fast and automatic. We understand an utterance as fast as we hear it or read it. But we know this understanding must
involve (at least) the following sub-operations: segmenting the continuous
speech signal into phonemes, morphemes, words, and phrases; looking up the
words and morphemes in the mental lexicon; finding the appropriate meanings of ambiguous words; parsing them into tree structures; choosing among
different possible structures when syntactic ambiguities arise; interpreting the
sentence; making a mental model of the discourse and updating it to reflect the
meaning of the new sentence; and other matters beyond the scope of our introductory text.
This seems like a great deal of work to be done in a very short time: we
can understand spoken language at a rate of twenty phonemes per second. One
might conclude that there must be some sort of a trick that makes it all possible.
In a certain sense there is. Because of the sequential nature of language, a certain
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amount of guesswork is involved in real-time comprehension. Many psycholinguists suggest that language perception and comprehension involve both topdown processing and bottom-up processing.
Top-down processes proceed from semantic and syntactic information to the
lexical information gained from the sensory input. Through use of such higherlevel information, we can try to predict what is to follow in the signal. For example, upon hearing the determiner the, the speaker begins constructing an NP
and expects that the next word could be a noun, as in the boy. In this instance
the knowledge of phrase structure would be the source of information.
Bottom-up processing moves step-by-step from the incoming acoustic (or
visual) signal, to phonemes, morphemes, words and phrases, and ultimately to
semantic interpretation. Each step of building toward a meaning is based on the
sensory data and accompanying lexical information. According to this model
the speaker waits until hearing the and boy before constructing an NP, and then
waits for the next word, and so on.
Evidence for top-down processing is found in experiments that require subjects to identify spoken words in the presence of noise. Listeners make more
errors when the words occur in isolation than when they occur in sentences.
Moreover, they make more errors if the words occur in anomalous, or nonsense, sentences; and they make the most errors if the words occur in ungrammatical sentences. Also, as discussed further below, when subjects are asked
to “shadow” sentences, that is, to repeat each word of a sentence immediately
upon hearing it, they often produce words in anticipation of the input. Based on
a computation of the meaning of the sentence to that point, they can guess what
is coming next. Apparently, subjects are using their knowledge of syntactic and
semantic relations to help them narrow down the set of candidate words.
Top-down processing is also supported by a different kind of experiment.
Subjects hear recorded sentences in which some part of the signal is removed
and a cough or buzz is substituted, such as the underlined “s” in the sentence
The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city. Their experience is that they “hear” the sentence as complete, without
any phonemes missing, and, in fact, have difficulty saying exactly where in the
word the noise occurred. This effect is called phoneme restoration. It would not
be surprising simply to find that subjects can guess that the word containing the
cough was legislatures. What is remarkable is that they really believe they are
hearing the [s], even when they are told it is not there. In this case, top-down
information apparently overrides bottom-up information.
There is also a role for context (top-down information) in segmentation. In
some instances even an utterance containing all familiar words can be divided
in more than one way. For example, the phonetic sequence [g r e d e] in a discussion of meat or eggs is likely to be heard as Grade A, but in a discussion of the
weather as grey day. In other cases, although the sequence of phonemes might
be compatible with two segmentations (e.g., [n aɪ t (ʰ) r e t]), the phonetic details
of pronunciation can signal where the word boundary is. In night rate, the first
t is part of the coda of the first syllable and thus unaspirated, whereas in nitrate
it begins the onset of the second syllable, which is stressed and therefore the t is
aspirated.
The Human Mind at Work: Human Language Processing
Lexical Access and Word Recognition
Oh, are you from Wales?
Do you know a fella named Jonah?
He used to live in whales for a while.
GROUCHO MARX (1890–1977)
Psycholinguists have conducted a great deal of research on lexical access or word
recognition, the process by which we obtain information about the meaning and
syntactic properties of a word from our mental lexicon. Several experimental
techniques have been used in studies of lexical access.
One technique involves asking subjects to decide whether a string of letters
(or sounds if auditory stimuli are used) is or is not a word. They must respond
by pressing one button if the stimulus is an actual word and a different button if
it is not, so they are making a lexical decision. During these and similar experiments, measurements of response time, or reaction time (often referred to as
RTs), are taken. The assumption is that the longer it takes to respond to a particular task, the more processing is involved. RT measurements show that lexical
access depends to some extent on word frequency; more commonly used words
(both spoken and written) such as car are responded to more quickly than words
that we rarely encounter such as fig.
Many properties of lexical access can be examined using lexical decision
experiments. In the following example, the relationship between the current
word and the immediately preceding word is manipulated. For example, making a lexical decision on the word doctor will be faster if you just made a
lexical decision on nurse than if you just made one on a semantically unrelated word such as flower. This effect is known as semantic priming: we say
that the word nurse primes the word doctor. This effect might arise because
semantically related words are located in the same part of the mental lexicon,
so when we hear a priming word and look it up in the lexicon, semantically
related, nearby words are “awakened” and more readily accessible for a few
moments.
Recent neurolinguistic research is showing the limits of the lexical decision
technique. It is now possible to measure electrical brain activity in subjects while
they perform a lexical decision experiment, and compare the patterns in brain
responses to patterns in RTs. (The technique is similar to the event-related brain
potentials mentioned in the introduction.) Such experiments have provided
results that directly conflict with the RT data. For example, measures of brain
activity show priming to pairs of verb forms such as teach/taught during the
early stages of lexical access, whereas such pairs do not show priming in lexical
decision RTs. This is because lexical decision involves several stages of processing, and patterns in early stages may be obscured by different patterns in later
stages. Brain measures, by contrast, are taken continuously and therefore allow
researchers to separately measure early and later processes.
One of the most interesting facts about lexical access is that listeners retrieve all
meanings of a word even when the sentence containing the word is biased toward
one of the meanings. This is shown in experiments in which the ambiguous word
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primes words related to both of its meanings. For example, suppose a subject hears
the sentence:
The gypsy read the young man’s palm for only a dollar.
Palm primes the word hand, so in a lexical decision about hand, a shorter RT
occurs than in a comparable sentence not containing the word palm. However, a
shorter RT also occurs for the word tree. The other meaning of palm (as in palm
tree) is apparently activated even though that meaning is not a part of the meaning of the priming sentence.
In listening or reading, then, all of the meanings represented by a string of
letters and sounds will be triggered. This argues for a limit on the effects of
top-down processing because the individual word palm is heard and processed
somewhat independently of its context, and so is capable of priming words
related to all its lexical meanings. However, the disambiguating information in
the sentence is used very quickly (within 250 milliseconds) to discard the meanings that are not appropriate to the sentence. If we check for priming after the
word only instead of right after the word palm in the previous example, we find
it for hand but no longer for tree.
Another experimental technique, called the naming task, asks the subject to
read aloud a printed word. (A variant of the naming task is also used in studies of people with aphasia, who are asked to name the object shown in a picture.) Subjects read irregularly spelled words like dough and steak just slightly
more slowly than regularly spelled words like doe and stake, but still faster than
invented strings like cluff. This suggests that people can do two different things
in the naming task. They can look for the string in their mental lexicon, and if
they find it (i.e., if it is a real word), they can pronounce the stored phonological representation for it. They can also “sound it out,” using their knowledge
of how certain letters or letter sequences (e.g., “gh,” “oe”) are most commonly
pronounced. The latter is obviously the only way to come up with a pronunciation for a nonexisting word.
The fact that irregularly spelled words are read more slowly than regularly
spelled real words suggests that the mind “notices” the irregularity. This may be
because the brain is trying to do two tasks—lexical look-up and sounding out
the word—in parallel in order to perform naming as fast as possible. When the
two approaches yield inconsistent results, a conflict arises that takes some time
to resolve.
Syntactic Processing
Teacher Strikes Idle Kids
Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Ax
Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years
Stolen Painting Found by Tree
AMBIGUOUS HEADLINES
Psycholinguistic research has also focused on syntactic processing. In addition
to recognizing words, the listener must figure out the syntactic and semantic
The Human Mind at Work: Human Language Processing
relations among the words and phrases in a sentence, what we earlier referred
to as “parsing.” The parsing of a sentence is largely determined by the rules
of the grammar, but it is also strongly influenced by the sequential nature of
language.
Listeners actively build a phrase structure representation of a sentence as they
hear it. They must therefore decide for each “incoming” word what its grammatical category is and how it attaches to the tree that is being constructed.
Many sentences present temporary ambiguities, such as a word or words that
belong to more than one syntactic category. For example, the string The warehouse fires . . . could continue in one of two ways:
1.
2.
. . . were set by an arsonist.
. . . employees over sixty.
Fires is part of a compound noun in sentence (1) and is a verb in sentence (2). As
noted earlier, experimental studies of such sentences show that both meanings
and categories are activated when a subject encounters the ambiguous word.
The ambiguity is quickly resolved (hence the term temporary ambiguity) based
on syntactic and semantic context, and on the frequency of the two uses of
the word. The disambiguations are so quick and seamless that unintentionally
ambiguous newspaper headlines such as those at the head of this section are
scarcely noticeable except to linguists who collect them.
Another important type of temporary ambiguity concerns sentences in which
the phrase structure rules allow two possible attachments of a constituent, as
illustrated by the following example:
After the child visited the doctor prescribed a course of injections.
Experiments that track eye movements of people when they read such sentences show that there may be attachment preferences that operate independently
of the context or meaning of the sentence. When the mental syntactic processor,
or parser, receives the word doctor, it attaches it as a direct object of the verb
visit in the subordinate clause. For this reason, subjects experience a strange perceptual effect when they encounter the verb prescribed. They must “change their
minds” and attach the doctor as subject of the main clause instead. Sentences
that induce this effect are called garden path sentences. The sentence presented
at the beginning of this chapter, The horse raced past the barn fell, is also a
garden path sentence. People naturally interpret raced as the main verb, when in
fact the main verb is fell.
The initial attachment choices that lead people astray may reflect general
principles used by the parser to deal with syntactic ambiguity. Two such principles that have been suggested are known as minimal attachment and late closure. Minimal attachment says, “Build the simplest structure consistent with
the grammar of the language.” In the string The horse raced . . . , the simpler
structure is the one in which the horse is the subject and raced the main verb;
the more complex structure is similar to The horse that was raced. . . . We can
think of simple versus complex here in terms of the amount of structure in the
syntactic tree for the sentence so far.
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The second principle, late closure, says “Attach incoming material to the
phrase that is currently being processed.” Late closure is exemplified in the following sentence:
The doctor said the patient will die yesterday.
Readers often experience a garden path effect at the end of this sentence because
their initial inclination is to construe yesterday as modifying will die, which is
semantically incongruous. Late closure explains this: The hearer encounters yesterday as he is processing the embedded clause, of which die is the main verb. On
the other hand, the verb said, which yesterday is supposed to modify, is part of the
root clause, which hasn’t been worked on for the past several words. The hearer
must therefore backtrack to attach yesterday to the clause containing said.
The comprehension of sentences depends on syntactic processing that uses
the grammar in combination with special parsing principles to construct trees.
Garden path sentences like those we have been discussing suggest that the mental parser sometimes makes a strong commitment to one of the possible parses.
Whether it always does so, and whether this means it completely ignores all
other parses, are open questions that are still being investigated by linguists.
Another striking example of processing difficulty is a rewording of a Mother
Goose poem. In its original form we have:
This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that
lay in the house that Jack built.
No problem understanding that? Now try this equivalent description:
Jack built the house that the malt that the rat that the cat that the dog
worried killed ate lay in.
No way, right?
Although the confusing sentence follows the rules of relative clause formation—you have little difficulty with the cat that the dog worried—it seems that
once is enough; when you apply the same process twice, getting the rat that the
cat that the dog worried killed, it becomes quite difficult to process. If we apply
the process three times, as in the malt that the rat that the cat that the dog worried killed ate, all hope is lost.
The difficulty in parsing this kind of sentence is related to memory constraints. In processing the sentence, you have to keep the malt in mind all the
way until ate, but while doing that you have to keep the rat in mind all the way
until killed, and while doing that. . . . It’s a form of structure juggling that is
difficult to perform; we evidently don’t have enough memory capacity to keep
track of all the necessary items. Though we have the competence to create such
sentences—in fact, we have the competence to make a sentence with 10,000
words in it—performance limitations prevent creation of such monstrosities.
Various experimental techniques are used to study sentence comprehension. In
addition to the priming and reading tasks, in a shadowing task subjects are asked
to repeat what they hear as rapidly as possible. Exceptionally good shadowers can
follow what is being said only about a syllable behind (300 milliseconds). Most of
us, however, shadow with a delay of 500 to 800 milliseconds, which is still quite
fast. More interestingly, fast shadowers often correct speech errors or mispronun-
The Human Mind at Work: Human Language Processing
ciations unconsciously and add inflectional endings if they are absent. Even when
they are told that the speech they are to shadow includes errors and they should
repeat the errors, they are rarely able to do so. Corrections are more likely to
occur when the target word is predictable from what has been said previously.
These shadowing experiments make at least two points: (1) they support
extremely rapid use of top-down information: differences in predictability have
an effect within about one-quarter of a second; and (2) they show how fast the
mental parser does grammatical analysis, because some of the errors that are
corrected, such as missing agreement inflections, depend on successfully parsing
the immediately preceding words.
The ability to comprehend what is said to us is a complex psychological process involving the internal grammar, parsing principles such as minimal attachment and late closure, frequency factors, memory, and both linguistic and nonlinguistic context.
Speech Production
Speech was given to the ordinary sort of men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to
wise men, whereby to conceal it.
ROBERT SOUTH, sermon at Westminster Abbey, April 30, 1676
As we saw, the speech chain starts with a speaker who, through some complicated set of neuromuscular processes, produces an acoustic signal that represents a thought, idea, or message to be conveyed to a listener, who must then
decode the signal to arrive at a similar message. It is more difficult to devise
experiments that provide information about how the speaker proceeds than to
do so for the listener’s side of the process. Much of the best information has
come from observing and analyzing spontaneous speech.
Planning Units
“U.S. Acres” copyright © Paws. All rights reserved.
We might suppose that speakers’ thoughts are simply translated into words one
after the other via a semantic mapping process. Grammatical morphemes would
be added as demanded by the syntactic rules of the language. The phonetic representation of each word in turn would then be mapped onto the neuromuscular
commands to the articulators to produce the acoustic signal representing it.
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We know, however, that this is not a true picture of speech production.
Although sounds within words and words within sentences are linearly ordered,
speech errors, or slips of the tongue (also discussed in chapter 5), show that the
prearticulation stages involve units larger than the single phonemic segment or
even the word, as illustrated by the “U.S. Acres” cartoon. That error is an example of a spoonerism, named after William Archibald Spooner, a distinguished
dean of an Oxford college in the early 1900s who is reported to have referred to
Queen Victoria as “That queer old dean” instead of “That dear old queen,” and
berated his class of students by saying, “You have hissed my mystery lecture.
You have tasted the whole worm” instead of the intended “You have missed my
history lecture. You have wasted the whole term.”
Indeed, speech errors show that features, segments, words, and phrases may
be conceptualized well before they are uttered. This point is illustrated in the
following examples of speech errors (the intended utterance is to the left of the
arrow; the actual utterance, including the error, is to the right of the arrow):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The hiring of minority faculty. → The firing of minority faculty.
(The intended h is replaced by the f of faculty, which occurs later in the
intended utterance.)
ad hoc → odd hack
(The vowels /æ/ of the first word and /a/ of the second are exchanged or
reversed.)
big and fat → pig and vat
(The values of a single feature are switched: in big [+voiced] becomes
[–voiced] and in fat [–voiced] becomes [+voiced].)
There are many ministers in our church. → There are many churches in
our minister.
(The root morphemes minister and church are exchanged; the grammatical
plural morpheme remains in its intended place in the phrase structure.)
salute smartly → smart salutely (heard on All Things Considered, National
Public Radio (NPR), May 17, 2007.)
(The root morphemes are exchanged, but the -ly affix remains in place.)
Seymour sliced the salami with a knife. → Seymour sliced a knife with the
salami.
(The entire noun phrases—article + noun—were exchanged.)
In these errors, the intonation contour (primary stressed syllables and variations in pitch) remained the same as in the intended utterances, even when the
words were rearranged. In the intended utterance of (6), the highest pitch would
be on knife. In the misordered sentence, the highest pitch occurred on the second
syllable of salami. The pitch rise and increased loudness are thus determined
by the syntactic structure of the sentence and do not depend on the individual
words. Syntactic structures exist independently of the words that occupy them,
and intonation contours can be mapped onto those structures without being
associated with particular words.
Errors like those just cited are constrained in interesting ways. Phonological errors involving segments or features, as in (1), (2), and (3), primarily occur
in content words, and not in grammatical morphemes, showing the distinction
between these lexical classes. In addition, while words and lexical morphemes
The Human Mind at Work: Human Language Processing
may be interchanged, grammatical morphemes may not be. We do not find
errors like The boying are sings for The boys are singing. Typically, as example
(4) illustrates, the inflectional endings are left behind when lexical morphemes
switch and subsequently attach, in their proper phonological form, to the moved
lexical morpheme.
Errors like those in (1)–(6) show that speech production operates in real time
with features, segments, morphemes, words, phrases—the very units that exist
in the grammar. They also show that when we speak, words are chosen and
sequenced ahead of when they are articulated. We do not select one word from
our mental dictionary and say it, then select another word and say it.
Lexical Selection
Humpty Dumpty’s theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau,
seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words “fuming” and
“furious.” Make up your mind that you will say both words but leave it unsettled which
you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If . . . you have that rarest of gifts, a
perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious.”
LEWIS CARROLL, Preface to The Hunting of the Snark, 1876
In chapter 3, word substitution errors were used to illustrate the semantic properties of words. Such substitutions are seldom random; they show that in our attempt
to express our thoughts by speaking words in the lexicon, we may make an incorrect lexical selection based on partial similarity or relatedness of meanings.
Blends, in which we produce part of one word and part of another, further
illustrate the lexical selection process in speech production; we may select two or
more words to express our thoughts and instead of deciding between them, we
produce them as “portmanteaus,” as Humpty Dumpty calls them. Such blends
are illustrated in the following errors:
1.
2.
3.
4.
splinters/blisters
edited/annotated
a swinging/hip chick
frown/scowl
→
→
→
→
splisters
editated
a swip chick
frowl
These blend errors are typical in that the segments stay in the same position
within the syllable as they were in the target words. This is not true in the previous example made up by Lewis Carroll: a much more likely blend of fuming and
furious would be fumious or furing.
Application and Misapplication of Rules
I thought . . . four rules would be enough, provided that I made a firm and constant
resolution not to fail even once in the observance of them.
RENÉ DESCARTES, Discourse on Method, 1637
Spontaneous errors show that the rules of morphology and syntax, discussed in
earlier chapters as part of competence, may also be applied (or misapplied) when
we speak. It is difficult to see this process in normal error-free speech, but when
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someone says groupment instead of grouping, ambigual instead of ambiguous,
or bloodent instead of bloody, it shows that regular rules are applied to combine
morphemes and form possible but nonexistent words.
Inflectional rules also surface. The UCLA professor who said *We swimmed
in the pool knows that the past tense of swim is swam, but he mistakenly applied
the regular rule to an irregular form.
Morphophonemic rules also appear to be performance rules as well as rules
of competence. Consider the a/an alternation rule in English. Errors such as an
istem for the intended a system or a burly bird for the intended an early bird
show that when segmental misordering changes a noun beginning with a consonant to a noun beginning with a vowel, or vice versa, the indefinite article is also
changed so that it conforms to the grammatical rule.
Speakers hardly ever produce errors like *an burly bird or *a istem, which
tells us something about the stages in the production of an utterance. The rule
that determines whether a or an should be produced (an precedes a vowel; a
precedes a consonant) must apply after the stage at which early has slipped to
burly; that is, the stage at which /b/ has been anticipated. If a/an were selected
first, the article would be an (or else the rule must reapply after the initial error
has occurred). Similarly, an error such as bin beg for the intended Big Ben
shows that phonemes are misordered before allophonic rules apply. That is, the
intended Big Ben phonetically is [bɪg bɛ̃n] with an oral [ɪ] before the [g], and a
nasal [ɛ̃] before the [n]. In the utterance that was produced, however, the [ɪ] is
nasalized because it now occurs before the misordered [n], whereas the [ɛ̃] is oral
before the misordered [g]. If the misordering occurred after the phonemes had
undergone allophonic rules such as nasalization, the result would have been the
phonetic utterance [bɪn bɛ̃g].
Nonlinguistic Influences
Our discussion of speech comprehension suggested that nonlinguistic factors can
be involved in—and sometimes interfere with—linguistic processing. They also
affect speech production. The individual who said He made hairlines instead of He
made headlines was referring to a barber. The fact that the two compound nouns
both start with the same sound, are composed of two syllables, have the same
stress pattern, and contain the identical second morphemes undoubtedly played a
role in producing the error, but the relationship between hairlines and barbers may
also have been a contributing factor. Similar comments apply to the congressional
representative who said, “It can deliver a large payroll” instead of “It can deliver a
large payload,” in reference to a bill to fund the building of bomber aircraft.
Other errors show that thoughts unrelated in form to the intended utterance
may have an influence on what is said. One speaker said, “I’ve never heard of
classes on April 9” instead of the intended on Good Friday. Good Friday fell on
April 9 that year. The two phrases are not similar phonologically or morphologically, yet the nonlinguistic association seems to have influenced what was said.
Both normal conversational data and experimentally elicited data provide the
psycholinguist with evidence for the construction of models both of speech production and of comprehension, the beginning and ending points of the speech
chain of communication.
Computer Processing of Human Language
Computer Processing
of Human Language
Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.
JOHN F. KENNEDY (1917–1963)
Until a few decades ago, language was strictly “humans only—others need not
apply.” Today, it is common for computers to process language. Computational
linguistics is a subfield of linguistics and computer science that is concerned with
the interactions of human language and computers.
Computational linguistics includes the analysis of written texts and spoken
discourse, the translation of text and speech from one language into another, the
use of human (not computer) languages for communication between computers
and people, and the modeling and testing of linguistic theories.
Computers That Talk and Listen
The first generations of computers had received their inputs through glorified typewriter
keyboards, and had replied through high-speed printers and visual displays. HAL could do
this when necessary, but most of his communication with his shipmates was by means of
the spoken words. Poole and Bowman could talk to HAL as if he were a human being, and
he would reply in the perfect idiomatic English he had learned during the fleeting weeks of
his electronic childhood.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
The ideal computer is multilingual; it should “speak” computer languages such
as FORTRAN and Java, and human languages such as French and Japanese.
For many purposes it would be helpful if we could communicate with computers
as we communicate with other humans, through our native language. But as of
the year 2010, the computers portrayed in films and on television as capable of
speaking and understanding human language do not exist.
Computational linguistics is concerned with the interaction between language
and computers in all dimensions, from phonetics to pragmatics, from producing
speech to comprehending speech, from spoken (or signed) utterances to written
forms. Computational phonetics and phonology is concerned with processing
speech. Its main goals are converting speech to text on the comprehension side, and
text to speech on the production side. The areas of computational morphology,
computational syntax, computational semantics, and computational pragmatics,
discussed below, are concerned with higher levels of linguistic processing.
Computational Phonetics and Phonology
The two sides of computational phonetics and phonology are speech recognition
and speech synthesis. Speech recognition is the process of analyzing the speech
signal into its component phones and phonemes, and producing, in effect, a
phonetic transcription of the speech. Further processing may convert the transcription into ordinary text for output on a screen, or into words and phrases
for further processing, as in a speech understanding application. (Note: Speech
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recognition is not the same as speech understanding, as is commonly thought.
Rather, speech recognition is a necessary precursor to the far more complex process of comprehension.)
Speech synthesis is the process of creating electronic signals that simulate
the phones and prosodic features of speech and assemble them into words and
phrases for output to an electronic speaker, or for further processing as in a
speech generation application.
Speech Recognition
When Frederic was a little lad he proved so brave and daring,
His father thought he’d ’prentice him to some career seafaring.
I was, alas! his nurs’rymaid, and so it fell to my lot
To take and bind the promising boy apprentice to a pilot—
A life not bad for a hardy lad, though surely not a high lot,
Though I’m a nurse, you might do worse than make your boy a pilot.
I was a stupid nurs’rymaid, on breakers always steering,
And I did not catch the word aright, through being hard of hearing;
Mistaking my instructions, which within my brain did gyrate
I took and bound this promising boy apprentice to a pirate.
GILBERT AND SULLIVAN, The Pirates of Penzance, 1879
When you listen to someone speak a foreign language, you notice that it is continuous except for breath pauses, and that it is difficult to segment the speech
into sounds and words. It’s all run together. The computer faces this situation
when it tries to do speech recognition.
Early speech recognizers were not designed to “hear” individual sounds.
Rather, the computers were programmed to store the acoustic patterns of entire
words or even phrases in their memories, and then further instructed to look for
those patterns in any subsequent speech they were asked to recognize. The computers had a fixed, small vocabulary. Moreover, they best recognized the speech
of the same person who provided the original word patterns. They would have
trouble “understanding” a different speaker, and if a word outside the vocabulary
was uttered, the computers were clueless. If the words were run together, recognition accuracy also fell, and if the words were not fully pronounced, say missipi
for Mississippi, failure generally ensued. Coarticulation effects also muddied the
waters. The computers might have [hɪz] as their representation of the word his,
but in the sequence his soap, pronounced [hɪssop], the his is pronounced [hɪs]
with a voiceless [s]. In addition, the vocabulary best consisted of words that were
not too similar phonetically, avoiding confusion between words like pilot and
pirate, which might, as with the young lad in the song, have grave consequences.
Today, many interactive phone systems have a speech recognition component.
They will invite you to “press 1 or say ‘yes’; press 2 or say ‘no,’ ” or perhaps offer
a menu of choices triggered by one or more spoken word responses. Sophisticated mobile phones allow their owners to preprogram complete phrases such
as “call my office” or “display the calendar.” These systems have very small
vocabularies and so can search the speech signal for anything resembling prestored acoustic patterns of a keyword and generally get it right.
Computer Processing of Human Language
The more sophisticated speech recognizers that can be purchased for use on a
personal computer have much larger vocabularies, often the size of an abridged
dictionary. To be highly accurate they must be trained to the voice of a specific
person, and they must be able to detect individual phones in the speech signal.
The training consists in the user making multiple utterances known in advance to
the computer, which extracts the acoustic patterns of each phone typical of that
user. Later the computer uses those patterns to aid in the recognition process.
Because no two utterances are ever identical, and because there is generally noise (nonspeech sounds) in the signal, the matching process that underlies
speech recognition is statistical. On the phonetic level, the computations may
classify some stretch of sound in its input as [l] with 65 percent confidence and
[r] with 35 percent confidence. Other factors may be used to help the decision.
For example, if the computer is confident that the preceding sound is [d] and
begins the word, then [r] is the likely candidate, because no words begin with
/dl/ in English. The system takes advantage of its (i.e., the programmer’s) knowledge of sequential constraints (see chapter 5). If, on the other hand, the sound
occurs at the beginning of the word, further information is needed to determine
whether it is the phoneme /l/ or /r/. If the following sounds are [up] then /l/ is the
one, because loop is a word but *roop is not. If the computer is unable to decide,
it may offer a list of choices such as late and rate and ask the person using the
system to decide.
Advanced speech recognizers may utilize syntactic rules to further disambiguate an utterance. If the late/rate syntactic context is “It’s too ___” the choice is
late because too may be followed by an adjective but not by a noun or verb. Statistical disambiguation may also be used. For example, in a standard corpora of
English there will be far more occurrences of “It’s too late . . .” than there might
be of, say, “It’s to rate . . .” A statistical model can be built based on such facts
that would lead the machine to give weight to the choice of late rather than rate.
Even these modern systems, with all the computing power behind them, are
brittle. They break when circumstances become unfavorable. If the user speaks
rapidly with lots of coarticulation (whatcha for what are you), and there is a lot
of background noise, recognition accuracy plummets. People do better. If someone mumbles, you can generally make out what they are saying because you
have context to help you. In a noisy setting such as a party, you are able to converse with your dance partner despite the background noise because your brain
has the ability to filter out irrelevant sounds and zero in on the voice of a single
speaker. This effect is so striking it is given a name: the cocktail party effect.
Computers are not nearly as capable as people in coping with noise, although
research directed at the problem is beginning to show positive results.
Speech Synthesis
Machines which, with more or less success, imitate human speech, are the most difficult
to construct, so many are the agencies engaged in uttering even a single word—so many
are the inflections and variations of tone and articulation, that the mechanician finds his
ingenuity taxed to the utmost to imitate them.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, January 14, 1871
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Early efforts toward building “talking machines” were concerned with machines
that could produce sounds that imitated human speech. In 1779, Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein won a prize for building such a machine. It was “an instrument
constructed like the vox humana pipes of an organ which . . . accurately express
the sounds of the vowels.” In building this machine he also answered a question
posed by the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg, Russia: “What is the nature
and character of the sounds of the vowels a, e, i, o, u [that make them] different from one another?” Kratzenstein constructed a set of “acoustic resonators”
similar to the shapes of the mouth when these vowels are articulated and set
them resonating by a vibrating reed that produced pulses of air similar to those
coming from the lungs through the vibrating vocal cords.
Nearly a century later, a young Alexander Graham Bell, always fascinated
with speech and its production, fabricated a “talking head” from a cast of a
human skull. He used various materials to form the velum, palate, teeth, lips,
tongue, cheeks, and so on, and installed a metal larynx with vocal cords made by
stretching a slotted piece of rubber. A keyboard control system manipulated all
the parts with an intricate set of levers. This ingenious machine produced vowel
sounds, some nasal sounds, and even a few short combinations of sounds.
With the advances in the acoustic theory of speech production and the technological developments in electronics, machine production of speech sounds has
made great progress. We no longer have to build physical models of the speechproducing mechanism; we can now imitate the process by producing the physical signals electronically.
Speech sounds can be reduced to a small number of acoustic components.
One way to produce synthetic speech is to mix these components together in the
proper proportions, depending on the speech sounds to be imitated. It is rather
like following a recipe for making soup, which might read: “Take two quarts of
water, add one onion, three carrots, a potato, a teaspoon of salt, a pinch of pepper, and stir it all together.”
This method of producing synthetic speech would include a recipe that might
read:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Start with a tone at the same frequency as vibrating vocal cords (higher if a
woman’s or child’s voice is being synthesized, lower for a man’s).
Emphasize the harmonics corresponding to the formants required for a
particular vowel, liquid, or nasal quality.
Add hissing or buzzing for fricatives.
Add nasal resonances for nasal sounds.
Temporarily cut off sound to produce stops and affricates.
and so on. . . .
All of these ingredients are blended electronically, using computers to produce
highly intelligible, more or less natural-sounding speech. Because item (2) is central to the process, this method of speech synthesis is called formant synthesis.
Most synthetic speech still has a machinelike quality or accent, caused by
small inaccuracies in simulation, and because suprasegmental factors such as
changing intonation and stress patterns are not yet fully understood. If not correct, such factors may be more confusing than mispronounced phonemes. Currently, the chief area of research in speech synthesis is concerned precisely with
Computer Processing of Human Language
discovering and programming the rules of rhythm and timing that native speakers apply. Still, speech synthesizers today are no harder to understand than a
person speaking a dialect slightly different from one’s own, and when the context is sufficiently narrow, as in a synthetic voice reading a weather report (a
common application), there are no problems.
An alternative approach to formant synthesis is concatenative synthesis. The
basic units of concatenative synthesis are recorded units such as phones, diphones,
syllables, morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. A diphone is a transitional
unit comprising the last portion of one phone plus the first portion of another, used
to smooth coarticulation effects. There may be hundreds or even thousands of these
little acoustic pieces. The recordings are made by human speakers. The synthesis
aspect is in the assembling of the individual units to form the desired computerspoken utterance. This would not be possible without the increased computational
power now available, and today’s synthesizers are generally of this type.
The challenge in concatenative synthesis is achieving the fluidity of human
speech. This requires electronic fine tuning of speech prosody, that is, duration,
intonation, pitch, and loudness on which naturalness is based. At this time much
concatenative speech sounds stilted as the units do not always fit together seamlessly, and the perfection of prosodic effects remains elusive.
Text-to-Speech
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR. (1809–1894)
To provide input to the speech synthesizer, a computer program called text-tospeech converts written text into the basic units of the synthesizer. For formant
synthesizers, the text-to-speech process translates the input text into a phonetic
representation. This task is like the several exercises at the end of chapter 4, in
which we asked you for a phonetic transcription of written words. Naturally, the
text-to-speech process precedes the electronic conversion to sound.
For concatenative synthesizers, the text-to-speech process translates the input
text into a representation based on whatever units are to be concatenated. For a
syllable-based synthesizer, the text-to-speech program would take The number
is 5557766 as input and produce [θə] [nʌ̃ m] [bər] [ɪz] [faɪv] [faɪv] [faɪv] [sɛv] [ə̃n]
[sɛv] [ə̃n] [sɪks] [sɪks] as output. The “synthesizer” (a computer program) would
look up the various syllables in its memory and concatenate them, with further
electronic processing supplied for realistic prosody and to smooth over the syllable boundaries.
The difficulties of text-to-speech are legion. We will mention two. The first
is the problem of words spelled alike but pronounced differently. Read may be
pronounced as [rɛd] in She has read the book, but like [ri:d] in She will read
the book. How does the text-to-speech system know which is which? Make no
mistake about the answer; the machine must have structural knowledge of the
sentence to make the correct choice, just as humans must. Unstructured, linear
knowledge will not suffice. For example, we might program the text-to-speech
system to pronounce read as [rɛd] when the previous word is a form of have,
but this approach fails in several ways. First, the have governs the pronunciation at a distance, both from the left and the right, as in Has the girl with the
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flaxen hair read the book? and Oh, read a lot of books, has he! The underlying
structure needs to be known, namely that has is an auxiliary verb for the main
verb to read. If we try the strategy “pronounce read as [rɛd] whenever have is
‘in the vicinity,’ ” we would induce an error in sentences like The teacher said
to have the girl read the book by tomorrow, where [riːd] is the required pronunciation. Even worse for the linear analysis are sentences like Which girl did the
teacher have read from the book? where the words have read occur next to each
other, but the correct version is [riːd]. Of course you know that this occurrence
of read is [riːd], because you know English and therefore know English syntactic structures. Only through structural knowledge can the “spelled-the-samepronounced-differently” problem be approached effectively. We’ll learn more
about this in the section on computational syntax later in the chapter.
The second difficulty is inconsistent spelling, which is well illustrated by the
first two lines of a longer poem:
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough
Each of the ough words is phonetically different, but it is difficult to find rules that
dictate when gh should be [f] and when it is silent, or how to pronounce the ou.
Modern computers have sufficient storage capacity to store the recorded pronunciation of every word in the language, its alternative pronunciations, and its likely
pronunciations, which may be determined by an extensive statistical analysis. This
list may include acronyms, abbreviations, foreign words, proper names, numbers
including fractions, and special symbols such as #, &, *, %, and so on. Such a list
is helpful—it is like memorizing rather than figuring out the pronunciations—and
encompasses a large percentage of items, including the ough words. This is the
basis of word-level concatenative synthesis. However, the list can never be complete. New words, new word forms, proper names, abbreviations, and acronyms
are constantly being added to the language and cannot be anticipated. The textto-speech system requires conversion rules for items not in its dictionary, and these
must be output by a formant synthesizer or a concatenative synthesizer based on
units smaller than the word if they are to be spoken. The challenges here are similar to those faced when learning to read aloud, which are considerable and, when
it comes to the pronunciation of proper names or foreign words, utterly daunting.
Speech synthesis has important applications. It benefits visually impaired persons in the form of “reading machines,” now commercially available, and vocal
output of what is displayed on a computer screen. Mute patients with laryngectomies or other medical conditions that prevent normal speech can use synthesizers
to express themselves. For example, researchers at North Carolina State University developed a communication system for an individual with so severe a form of
multiple sclerosis that he could utter no sound and was totally paralyzed except
for nodding his head. Using a head movement for “yes” and its absence as “no,”
this individual could select words displayed on a computer screen and assemble
sentences to express his thoughts, which were then spoken by a synthesizer.
Computational Morphology
If we wish our computers to speak and understand grammatical English, we
must teach them morphology (see chapter 1). We can’t have machines going
Computer Processing of Human Language
around saying “*The cat is sit on the mat” or “*My five horse be in the barn.”
Similarly, if computers are to understand English, they need to know that sitting
contains two morphemes, sit + ing, whereas spring is one morpheme, and reinvent is two but they are re + invent, not rein + vent.
The processing of word structures by computers is computational morphology.
The computer needs to understand the structure of words both to understand the
words and to use the words in a grammatically correct way. To process words,
the computer is programmed to look for roots and affixes. In some cases this process is straightforward. Books is easily broken into book + s, walking into walk
+ ing, fondness into fond + ness, and unhappy into un + happy. These cases, and
many like them, are the easy ones, because the spelling is well behaved, and the
morphological processes are general. Other words are more difficult, such as profundity = profound + ity, galactic = galaxy + ic, and democracy = democrat + y.
One approach is to place all the morphological forms of all the words in the
language into the computer’s dictionary. Although today’s computers can handle
such a high computational load—many millions of forms—there would still be
problems because of the generality of the processes. As soon as a new word
enters the language, as fax did some years ago, a whole family of words is possible: faxes, fax’s, faxing, faxed, refax, and faxable; and many others are not
possible: *faxify, *exfax, *disfax, and so on. The dictionary would be continually out of date.
Moreover, not all forms are predictable. Although heaten is not a dictionary
word, if you hear it you know, and the computer should know, that it means “to
make hot.” Likewise, compounding is a general process, and it would be impossible to predict all possible compounds of English. When podcast was coined
from pod + cast, no computer could have had it in its dictionary.
The computer needs to have the ability to break words correctly into their
component morphemes, and to understand each morpheme and its effect on the
word’s meaning, and where the word can be placed in a sentence. Computational morphology, then, is a host of interwoven rules, exceptions, and word/
morpheme forms, all with the purpose of comprehending the internal structure
of words.
One method of morphological analysis is called stemming. Here, affixes are
detected and repeatedly stripped of the beginnings and ends of words, checking
the work against computer’s dictionary. For example, if the word to be analyzed
were befriended, the computer would recognize and verify the prefix be- and
the suffix -ed, leaving behind the root friend, all of which would be verified in a
dictionary of words and morphemes. More complex words such as unsystematically would be repeatedly broken down in -ly (an adverb-former), -al, -atic (both
adjective-formers), system (a root word), and un- (a negative morpheme).
Difficult problems always remain. If the computer sees resent, how does it
know if it’s the monomorphemic resent (with a /z/), or re + sent? A broader context is needed, and that is the topic of the next section.
Computational Syntax
Good order is the foundation of all things.
EDMUND BURKE, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
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In the beginning, there was ELIZA.
patient:
eliza:
patient:
eliza:
patient:
eliza:
patient:
eliza:
Men are all alike.
In what way?
They’re always bugging me about something or other.
Can you think of a specific example?
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
Your boyfriend made you come here?
He says I’m depressed much of the time.
I am sorry to hear you are depressed.
ELIZA is a computer program designed to simulate a nondirective psychiatrist
talking to a patient. ELIZA has a collection of prepared phrases stored in memory such as “In what way?” or “Tell me more” that help keep the conversation
going when it doesn’t “understand” the patient. When ELIZA recognizes certain
syntactic patterns, however, it turns them around to make a sensible response, as
when it echoes “Your boyfriend made you come here?” ELIZA was programmed
with a small bit of syntactic knowledge, which allowed it to make grammatical
utterances based on the patient’s statements, but no semantic knowledge at all.
If a patient says “My sniggle is untherible,” ELIZA would respond with “How
long has your sniggle been untherible?” ELIZA was designed by the MIT scientist Joseph Weizenbaum (1923–2008) in the 1960s. Though its syntactic sophistication is low by today’s standards, ELIZA is one of the earliest attempts at
human-machine communication that took the syntax of English into account.
Twenty-five years after ELIZA, computer scientists at Duke University and
North Carolina State University programmed the “Circuit Fix-It Shop,” a system designed to help a technician repair a faulty circuit. Unlike ELIZA, which
accepted only typed input and produced printed output, the Circuit Fix-It Shop
accepted speech input and spoke its responses. It had its own syntax and was
capable both of understanding and speaking syntactically complex utterances,
as the following excerpt from a repair session shows:
computer:
technician:
computer:
technician:
computer:
technician:
computer:
technician:
computer:
This is the Circuit Fix-It Shop. How may I help you?
I need to fix the RS111 circuit.
I am familiar with that circuit. The LED is supposed to be
displaying alternately blinking one and seven.
Where is the LED?
In the middle right of the blue region is the LED.
No light.
What is the switch at when the LED is off?
The switch is down.
You put up the switch.
Once the computer has understood the technician’s utterance, it uses rules of
semantics and syntax, together with a lexicon of words and morphemes, to formulate a grammatical, sensible response, which it then speaks through its synthesizer. The rules in many cases are similar to the phrase structure rules seen
in chapter 2, such as “Form a noun phrase from an article followed by a noun.”
It also has semantic rules that tell it to use the with the word switch since its
“world knowledge” tells it that there is only one switch in that particular circuit.
Computer Processing of Human Language
Computational linguists at East Carolina University continue to broaden and
improve this prototype of a natural language, interactive repair manual.
To understand a sentence, you must know its syntactic structure. If you didn’t
know the structure of dogs that chase cats chase birds, you wouldn’t know
whether dogs or cats chase birds. Similarly, machines that understand language
must also determine syntactic structure. A parser is a computer program that
attempts to replicate what we have been calling the “mental parser.” Like the
mental parser, the parser in a computer uses a grammar to assign a phrase structure to a string of words. Parsers may use a phrase structure grammar and lexicon similar to those discussed in chapter 2.
For example, a parser may contain the following rules: S → NP VP, NP →
Det N, and so forth. Suppose the machine is asked to parse The child found
the kittens. A top-down parser proceeds by first consulting the grammar rules
and then examining the input string to see if the first word could begin an S. If
the input string begins with a Det, as in the example, the search is successful,
and the parser continues by looking for an N, and then a VP. If the input string
happened to be child found the kittens, the parser would be unable to assign it
a structure because it doesn’t begin with a determiner, which is required by this
grammar to begin an S. It would report that the sentence is ungrammatical.
A bottom-up parser takes the opposite tack. It looks first at the input string
and finds a Det (the) followed by an N (child). The rules tell it that this phrase
is an NP. It would continue to process found, the, and kittens to construct a VP,
and would finally combine the NP and VP to make an S.
Parsers may run into difficulties with words that belong to several syntactic
categories. In a sentence like The little orange rabbit hopped, the parser might
mistakenly assume orange is a noun. Later, when the error is apparent, the parser
backtracks to the decision point, and retries with orange as an adjective. Such
a strategy works on confusing but grammatical sentences like The old man the
boats and The Russian women loved died, which cause a garden path effect for
human (mental) parsers.
Another way to handle such ambiguous situations is for the computer to try
every parse that the grammar allows in parallel. Only parses that finish are
accepted as valid. In such a strategy, two parses of The Russian women loved
died would be explored simultaneously: Russian would be an adjective in one
and a noun in the other. The adjective parse would get as far as The Russian
women loved but then fail since died cannot occur in that position of a verb
phrase. (The parser must not allow ungrammatical sentences such as *The
y