1. Intro to course:
Language
O’Grady, 2011
Chapter 1

2. What is language?

3. When do we use
language?
• Talking
• Thinking
• Reading
• Writing
• Listening

4. What is linguistics?
• The study of language
WHAT DO WE STUDY ABOUT
LANGUAGE?
o How it is used
o How it is acquired
o How it changes over time
o How it is represented in the brain

5. Language is creative
• What does this mean?
o For example: use nouns as verbs
• Pull the boat on to a beach – beach the boat
• Clean the floor with a mop – mop the floor
• Put the wine in bottles – bottle the wine
HOWEVER,
o There are systematic constraints that determine the boundaries of
innovation.
For example: a verb is rarely coined if a word with its intended meaning
already exists
to put the milk in the fridge – to fridge the milk (refrigerate already exists
to express this meaning)

6. So what about creativity
in language?
• It is systematic and rule - governed

7. All native speakers can:
• Produce and understand an unlimited number of
utterances (including novel ones)
• Recognize utterances and patterns that are not
acceptable in their language.
LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE

8. How do we investigate
linguistic competence?
• Focus on the mental system –
GRAMMAR
WHAT IS GRAMMAR?
• Intricate system of knowledge that
encompasses sound and meaning,
form and structure

9. Components of Grammar
• Phonetics
• Phonology
• Morphology
• Syntax
• Semantics

10. Characteristics of
Grammar
• Generality
• Parity
• Universality
• Mutability
• Inaccessibility

11. GENERALITY
• All languages have grammar:
o If a language is spoken it must have
a phonetic and phonological system
o If it has words and sentences, it has
morphology and syntax
o If it has meaning, it also has semantic
principles

12. PRITY
• All grammars are equal
• “Primitive language”?
• Good grammar vs. bad grammar?
FOR LINGUISTS:
• The analysis of language reflects the way it is
actually used and not an idealized vision of how it
should be used.

13. UNIVERSALITY
• Grammars are alike in fundamental ways
For example:
o All languages have a set of contrastive sounds that
help distinguish words from each other (minimal
pairs). In English “t” and “d” help us recognize “to”
and “do” as two different words.
o All languages have more consonant sounds than
vowels.
o All languages have a “b” and a “p” sound.
o All languages have a vowel that sounds like “ah” in
thather.

14. UNIVERSALITY
• There are universal constraints on how words can
be put together in a sentence.
1. Ned lost his wallet.
2. He lost Ned’s wallet.
(in no language could “he” in 2 be referring to Ned)
• There are also constraints on how much variation is
possible in each language.
o Some languages move their question words at the beginning of a
sentence (English, Spanish etc.) and some don’t make this move
(Mandarin)
o No language however, places question words at the end of a sentence in
its basic word order.

15. MUTABILITY
• The features of language that are not universal and
fixed are subject to change over time.
For example:
• Minor changes can occur very quickly (lexicon)
• A more drastic change such as the placement of the negation in English
for example could take a long time:
Before 1200: Ic ne seye not. (I don’t say) / He ne speketh nawt. (He does not
speak).
By 1400: “ne” was used infrequently and “not” typically occurred by itself. (I
seye not the wordes. / We saw nawt the knyghtes.

16. INACCESSIBILITY
• Grammatical knowledge is subconscious.
For example:
• Speakers of a language know what sounds right and
what doesn’t in their language, but they are not sure
how they know it.
• Beyond the most obvious grammatical concepts
(articles go before nouns), native speakers can’t really
explain how their language works.
Try to explain:
I went to school. / *I went to supermarket.
The use of “or”: Mary drank tea or coffee. / Mary didn’t
drink tea or coffee.