LINGUISTICS

Prepared by Kay Catral

 TONGUE TWISTERS

Betty bought butter but the butter

was bitter, so Betty bought better
butter to make the bitter butter
better.
 TONGUE TWISTERS

Scissors sizzle, thistles sizzle.

 TONGUE TWISTERS

A loyal warrior will rarely

worry why we rule.
 TONGUE TWISTERS

The sixth sick sheik’s sixth

sheep’s sick.
 TONGUE TWISTERS

I slit the sheet, the sheet I

slit, and on the slitted
sheet I sit.
 TONGUE TWISTERS

I slit the sheet, the sheet I

slit, and on the slitted
sheet I sit.
• Language allows us to express and understand each
other’s thoughts, ideas, and feelings.
• Linguistics professor Robert A Hall defined language as
“the institution whereby humans communicate and
interact with each other by means of habitually used
oral-auditory symbols.”
• This definition provided the key ideas of how linguistics
approach and understand language and its use.
• Language is strictly a human capacity which allows us to relate
complex ideas.
• It is commonplace and is used with little cognitive effort as
evidenced by the rapid language acquisition of children.
• Language involves the mouth and the ears and is communicated
through speech and functions through the use of linguistic signs
or words that have no direct link to the natural world.
• The idea explains the multitudes of languages used throughout
the world.
 BBC - LANGUAGES - LANGUAGES - LANGUAGES OF THE WO
RLD - INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT LANGUAGES

• It’s estimated that up to 7,000 different languages are

spoken around the world. 90% of these languages are used
by less than 100,000 people. Over a million people
converse in 150-200 languages and 46 languages have just
a single speaker!
• Languages are grouped into families that share a common
ancestry. For example, English is related to German and
Dutch, and they are all part of the Indo-European family of
languages. These also include Romance languages, such as
French, Spanish and Italian, which come from Latin.
 BBC - LANGUAGES - LANGUAGES - LANGUAGES OF THE WO
RLD - INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT LANGUAGES

• 2,200 of the world’s languages can be found in Asia,

while Europe has a mere 260.
• Nearly every language uses a similar grammatical
structure, even though they may not be linked in
vocabulary or origin. Communities which are usually
isolated from each other because of mountainous
geography may have developed multiple
languages. Papua New Guinea for instance, boasts
no less than 832 different languages!
 LINGUISTICS
• Linguistics is interdisciplinary in nature,
intersecting the humanities with the social
sciences as it acquires on the basic element that
allows societies to communicate ideas across time
and space.
• The term linguistics was derived from the Latin
word lingua which refers to language.
 LINGUISTICS
• Linguistics as a discipline deals with 3 principal components: Sound,
structure, and meaning.
• Sound is divided into phonetics and phonology.
• Phonetics studies human speech while phonology studies the principles
governing sound systems of languages. Structure is divided into
morphology and syntax.
• Morphology studies language structure from its morphic units or roots,
while syntax studies sentence structure such as grammar.
• Meaning is divided into semantics and pragmatics. Semantics studies
the logic and meanings of words and phrases while pragmatics studies
the use of language and its effects on society.
LINGUISTICS
 LINGUISTICS

Hi my name is kay. I like studying

language. This is how words are
pronounced in symbol form. do you find
it interesting?
haɪ maɪ neɪm ɪz keɪ aɪ laɪk ˈstdiɪŋ
ˈlŋgwəʤ ðɪs ɪz haʊ wərdz ɑr prəˈnnst ɪn
ˈsmbəl fɔrm du ju faɪnd ɪt ˈihntəˌehɛstɪŋ
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTICS

• In the 19th century, linguistics was known as

philology or the study of the history of words.
• Philologists studied how and why words
transformed over time and examined which social
phenomena drove language to change.
• Such a task was difficult as the evolution of
language was complex.
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTICS

• Disagreements often arose among philologists

since a social phenomena resulting in a change in
a particular language cannot be generalized and
applied to other languages.
• This awareness resulted in various inquiries about
the parallelism of language and their histories.
 IMPORTANT PERSONALITIES IN
LINGUISTICS
1. Panini of India (born 4th Century BCE), was the first
individual credited to have practiced the study of
linguistics. He systematically categorized Sanskrit sounds
into consonants and vowels, and ouns and verbs.
2. Sibawayh (7th Century), in Middle east, documented the
Arabic language by distinguishing the differences in
sounds and phonemes.
3. Plato was the early scholar of language in the West. His
work Cratylus explored the meaning of words by looking
into their history.
 IMPORTANT PERSONALITIES IN
LINGUISTICS
*In the Middle Ages, linguistic studies focused on analyzing ancient
religious texts that allowed for a deeper understanding and
interpretation of religious dogma.
4. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a Swiss linguist and
semiotician, was credited as the father of both structural and modern
linguistics.
Structural linguistics studies language a s a system of contrast and
equivalents which means that the meaning of a word is understood only
in its relation to other words in the system.
He developed structural linguistics from his exploration of the concept of
sign. The actual object in the world addressed by the sign is called
referent.
• The Prague School, established in 1926, was a group
composed of Czechs and other linguists that held regular
meetings and published Travaux du cercle linguistique de
Prague, a journal on linguistics. The main focus and interest of
this group was phonological theory and syntax.
• The London school is more of a tradition of linguistic studies.
This can be traced back to Harry sweet (1845-1912) and
Daniel Jones (1881-1967). The tradition they established
resulted in a more meticulous attention to phonetic details
and led :’ear training’ to become a major linguistic field of
study in Britain.
• Sapir and Whorf
• Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf
(1897-1941) were American linguists who developed
the principle of linguistic relativity of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis.
• Whorf and Sapir pioneered linguistic determinism, or
the idea that language influences the way people think
and shapes the way people perceive the world.
• According to the hypothesis, language is deeply
rooted in culture which is why speakers of
different languages view the world differently
from one another.
• Direct translation cannot be perfectly achieved in
this sense because language is not merely
composed of a different signifier pointing to the
same referent, but are entirely different concepts.
• Noam Chomsky (born 1928) is an American
linguist, philosopher, and social justice activist.
• He established an number of objectives that
continue to direct linguistic studies until today.
• He espoused well-formed sentences as one of the
central ideas in generative grammar, a linguistic theory
which states that human beings are capable of forming
and distinguishing well-formed sentences and rejecting
ill-formed sentences.
• Being immersed in a particular language provides
enough competencies to detect and identify what
sentences are well-formed and ill-formed without
having to consult grammar books.
 THE FIELD OF LINGUISTICS
1.Historical Linguistics otherwise known as diachronic
linguistics studies how a particular language changed over
time.
2.Sociolinguistics examines how language is used in relation to
a people’s sociocultural environment and takes into
consideration:
A.The social background of the addresser and the addressee
B.The relationship of the addresser and the addressee
C.The context and manner through which the communication
transpired
 THE FIELD OF LINGUISTICS
*Subcultural reproduction of languages that are highly
often exclusive is one way by which language remains
dynamic.
An example of such is the Filipino gay language which
creates words or uses existing words but with different
contexts and meanings.
It is continually difficult to understand for those not part
of the community
 THE FIELD OF LINGUISTICS
3. Developmental linguistics analyzes the development
of language acquisition, language retention, and
language loss, and bilingualism. It studies the
development of linguistic ability among children and the
stages by which they gradually come to use language.
4. Neurolinguistics studies the physiological mechanisms
by which the brain processes the information in relation
to language. It investigates how it uses information tom
experiment and elaborate on linguistic and
psycholinguistic theories.
 KEY CONCEPTS IN LINGUISTICS
•Cohesion refers to linguistic links such as pronouns and
adjectives which provide a recognizable structure.
•Coherence is the logic within the discourse that takes into
account our knowledge of the world. Example:
•Question: “Who will take care of the baby?”
•Answer: “Daniel has a fever.”
•The answer in response to the question might seem irrelevant,
but it still makes sense because we know that fever is
contagious and could make the baby sick.
 KEY CONCEPTS IN LINGUISTICS
•Critical Discourse Analysis is the study of the text within its social
context.
• Dialect is an identifiable regional or social variety of language. A
language communicated over an area can be spoken differently
in some form or another in different places, and this is called
regional dialect
•Discourse is any connected speech or writing which serves as the
chain that holds communication together and is produced either
by a single speaker or writer or more.
•Etymology is the study of history or origin of a particular
language.
 KEY CONCEPTS IN LINGUISTICS
•Functionalism is an approach to language structure that
primarily focuses on the purpose in which language is
used.
•Grammar refers to the rules of constructing words and
sentences within a particular language.
•Grapheme is a single character in a recognized writing
system such as letters and punctuation marks.
•Lexicon is the total words available to a speaker or the
vocabulary of language.
 RESEARCH METHODS IN LINGUISTICS
•Corpus Linguistics is a method of studying a language based on
‘real-world’ context. Primary data undergoes 3 processes:
A.Annotation – where the scholar creates schemes in which he
categorizes spoken or written words
B.Abstraction – which is the translation of schematic terms to
theoretical frameworks
C.Analysis – where statistics is used to manipulate, probe, and
generalize from the existing set of data.
 CURRENT APPLICATIONS OF LINGUISTICS
• Computational Linguistics is the study of how
language can be computationally modeled using
the aid of computers.
• Lexicography is the practice of collecting words
and their meanings in a systematic manner
resembling the structure of a dictionary.
Lexicographers also document the pronunciation
of words and their subtle meanings among users.
 CURRENT APPLICATIONS OF LINGUISTICS
• Language enables humans to communicate more
efficiently so they can collaborate and survive in their
environment.
• As various forms of languages developed, there came a
need to understand and document these languages to
promote cross-cultural dialogues and understanding.
• With the initial goal of uncovering the historical roots of
languages, linguistics later transformed to a field of
studying more complex inquiries on the nexus of human
nature and the development of language.
“Let’s face it – English is a crazy language. There is no egg
in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine
in pineapple. In what language do people recite at a play,
and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by
ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a
slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise
man and a wise guy are opposites?
“English was invented by people, not computers, and it
reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course,
is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out,
they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are
invisible.”
[clear] [clear]
The bandage was wound around the wound.

The farm was used to produce produce.

The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

We must polish the Polish furniture.

He could lead if he would get the lead out.

The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time

to present the present.

A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

I did not object to the object.

The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

They were too close to the door to close it.

The buck does funny things when the does are present.

A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?