ling midterm 2 Flashcards
(30 cards)
Sociolinguistics & Language and gender
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- language also varies according to its context of use
- analysis of usage patters, e.g., “situation-dependent vs. elaborated reference,” “overt expression of argumentation,” “abstract vs. concrete style”
Sociolinguistics & Language and gender
Terminology: sex vs. gender
sex is genetics and physiology (e.g. larynx, brain?), whille gender is culture and identity (social norm, stereotype, etc.)
Sociolinguistics & Language and gender
Adults human males have significantly higher or lower voices than females do?
They have lower voices
Sociolinguistics & Language and gender
The pitch different difference between females and males reflects not only the difference in? ….
* vocal cord length
* vocal cord mass
* socially-conditioned factos
* all of the above
all of the above
Brain and language
What’s the aphasia that also called fluent sensory or sensory aphasia?
wernicke’s aphasia
Brain and language
What’s the aphasia that also called disfluent aphasia or agrammatic aphasia?
broca’s aphasia
Brain and language
What’s mind/brain dichotomy?
- mind: the mental processes of producing, perceiving and learning language; brain: the localization of different linguistic abilities in different regions of the brain, and also about how neural computation works in general. However, it’s still challenging for researchers to integrate the results of these two different kinds of investigation
- Examples: word frequency and recency
- word frequency effects and recency effects (mind)
- localizzation of langugae processing and memory (brain)
- but how are word frequency and recency effect actually implemented in the brain?
Linguistic form in art, ritual and play
Metric foot patterns
iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl,
Linguistic form in art, ritual and play
Iambic pentameter
its defintion and how to decide - scansion
Linguistic form in art, ritual and play
Which of these are (or could be) iambic pentameter?
* Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
* The winter! the brightness that blinds you
* And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same
Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
Language Production & Perception
Syntactic category rule
slips of the tongue and pen
the target (i.e. the world replaced) and the substiuting word are almost always of the same syntactic catergory
Language Production & Perception
What is “Freduian Slip?” Give an example of this phenomenon
- The speaker or writer may be unaware of the error that is contrary to the conscious wishes of the person speaking or writing. It is believed by Freud that such “slips” come from repressed, unconscious desires.
- I wanted to read my grandmother to the letter.” “I want to readed the letter to my grandmother
Language Production & Perception
What is a reasonable average word recognition time?
* 20ms
* 200 ms
* 2 s
* 20s
200 ms
Computational Linguistics
universal computing model - neural networks
Reading & writing
Reading & writing
- writing is not language; wiriting is a way of using “visible marks” to point ot pieces of real or hypothetical spoken language
- type of writing: all documented writing systems are a mixture of two or (usually) more of these categories, and all include a significant phonological aspect
- origin of writing
Reading & writing
Among the types of writing, which one best describes the English writing system? Which one best describes Chinese writing system?
- English: alphabetic
- Chinese: logrographic, and also (morpho-)syllabic
Reading & writing
What is Rebus Principle?
Rebus Principle: if you can’t make a picture of something, use a picture of something with the same sound
Reading & writing
Disucss why pictographic/ideographic writing not practical
- It is hard to design a universal pictographic/ideographic writing
system, and it’s also extremely hard for everyone to develop and
learn such a system - Since everyone already knows at least one ordinary spoken language,
practical people will always tend to give up on the ideographic
system and start using a written form of their speech
Children language acquisition
Children language acquisition
- milestones: babbling (canoncial, variegated), one word (holophrastic) stage, Two-word stage, telegraphic stage, later multiword stage
- Vocalizations in the first year of life; the tip of the velum reaches or overalps with the tip of the epiglottis
- the emergence of syntax
Children language acquisition
what is “vocal play?’ when do we observe it in babies?
- Manipulating pitch (to produce “squeals” and “growls”), loudness
(producing “yells”), and also manipulating tract closures to produce
friction noises, nasal murmurs, “raspberries” and “snorts” - During the period from 4-7 months
Children language acquisition
When does “canonical babbling” typically occur?
* 2-4 months
* 6-8 months
* 12-18 months
* 18-24 months
6-8 months
Language change
Language change
- Causations for language change: Language learning, Language contact, Social
differentiation, Natural processes in usage - Conditioned vs. unconditioned sound change
- Great Vowel Shift
- Historical Reconstruction
- Cognates: words in two or more daughter languages that derive from the same word
in the ancestral language - Lexicostatistics
Language change
Briefly described the difference between conditioned vs. unconditioned
sound change
- Conditioned sound change refers to systematic sound change that
applies in certain kinds of environments and not in others. These
changes are tied to certain linguistic conditions. - Unconditioned sound change, on the other hand, involves alterations
in speech sounds that occur without a specific linguistic cause or
contextual influence. These changes don’t follow a predictable
pattern tied to linguistic conditions.
Language change
Is Great Vowel Shift a conditioned or unconditioned sound change?
Unconditioned
