Week 1

Question 1

What is linguistics? And elaborate on what it is not.

Answer 1

The study of natural human language.

‘Human’ rules out the language of waggles dances of bees.

‘Natural’ rules out Fantasy language, such as Valyrian.

Includes creole languages.

Question 2

What does it mean when we say languages are naturally acquired (by children)?

Answer 2

In the first years of a child’s life, language is acquired without much strain and without any explicit instruction, suggesting that humans are predisposed to learn language.

Question 3

How does a creole language come to exist? Give an example.

Answer 3

Comes from contact between two or more languages.

Papiamento: derived from Portugese and Spanish, with Dutch, English, Indian and African influences.

Question 4

How can Middle English be viewed as a creole?

Answer 4

Derived from contact between Old English (Germanic) and Old French (a Romance language) following the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Question 5

Signed languages

Answer 5

Also a natural human language. These are produced in the visual-gestural modality.

This is in contrast with spoken languages, which are produced in the oral-auditory modality.

Question 6

Segments

Answer 6

Speech sounds

Question 7

Orthographic or spelling form

Answer 7

Letters, represented with < >

Question 8

Phonetic form

Answer 8

This consists of phonemes and is presented with slant brackets.