martes, 29 de noviembre de 2011

ANTROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language.
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This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.


Franz Boas was one of the principal founders of modern American Anthropology and Ethnology.


His personal research contributions gave him an important place in the history of anthropology.  Even Boas has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology.” Although Boas published descriptive studies of Native American languages, and wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, he left it to colleagues and students such as Edward Sapir to research the relationship between culture and language.

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Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. His name is borrowed in what is now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He was a highly influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of the discipline.




Sapir's classifies all the languages in North America into only 6 families:
Eskimo–Aleut
Algonkin–Wakashan
Nadene
Penutian
Hokan–Siouan
and Aztec–Tanoan.
    Sapir's classification (or something derivative) is still commonly used in general languages-of-the-world type surveys.

Linguistic relativity is a general term used to refer to various hypotheses or positions about the relationship between language and culture.
  For Sapir, linguistic relativity was a way of articulating what he saw as the struggle between the individual and society. In order to communicate their unique experiences, individuals need to rely on a public code over which they have little control.

Activity

Ethnography of Speech

http://www.educaplay.com/es/recursoseducativos/565071/ethnography_of_speech.htm

Activity

THE LONDON SCHOOL
http://www.educaplay.com/es/recursoseducativos/565060/the_london_school.htm

A C T I V I T Y

So, this is and activity regarding the topic of Chomsky's context-free grammar and Formalism. It's not that hard. Good luck guys!

http://www.educaplay.com/es/recursoseducativos/565053/chomsky_activity.htm

Ethnography of Speech

       The role of speech in human behavior has always been honored in anthropological principle, if sometimes slighted in practice. The importance of its study has been declaimed, surveyed with insightful detail, and accepted as a principle of field work.
       The Ethnography was pioneered in the field of socio-cultural anthropology but has also become a popular method in various other fields of social sciences—particularly in sociology, communication studies, history. —that studies people, ethnic groups and other ethnic formations, their ethnogenesis, composition, resettlement, social welfare characteristics, as well as their material and spiritual culture. 
       The Ethnography of communication (EOC) is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics, which draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, it takes both language and culture to be constitutive as well as constructive.
       EOC can be used as a means by which to study the interactions among members of a specific culture or, what Gerry Philipsen (1975) calls a "speech community." Speech communities create and establish their own speaking codes/norms. 
       The meaning and understanding of the presence or absence of speech within different communities will vary. Local cultural patterns and norms must be understood for analysis and interpretation of the appropriateness of speech acts situated within specific communities.
       Thus, “the statement that talk is not anywhere valued equally in all social contexts suggests a research strategy for discovering and describing cultural or subcultural differences in the value of speaking. 

The London School

The London School
¢  Linguistic description evolves a standard language since eleventh century.
¢  Henry Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the working of the vocal organs. He was concerned with the systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform-.
Phonetics
Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized in an ideal system of orthography
¢  Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of through training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech- sound.
¢  He invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels. 
Linguistics
¢  J.R. Firth turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject.
¢  Firth said that the phonology of a language consist of a number of system of alternative possibilities which come into play at different points in phonological unit such a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.
School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas)
¢  It was founded in 1916.
London linguistics was a brand of linguistics in which theorizing was controlled by healthy familiarity with realities of alien tongues.
¢  A Firthian phonologycal analysis recognizes a number of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units.
¢  The terminological distinction between ‘prosodies’ and ‘phonematic units’ could as well be thought of as ‘prosodies’ that happen to be only one segment long.
¢  It is a characteristic of the Firthian approach to be much more concerned with the ‘systems’ of choices between alternatives which occur in a language than with the details of how particular alternatives are realized.
¢  Linguistics of the London School have done much  more work on the analysis of intonation that have Americans of any camp and the Brithis work.
¢  To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski, professor of Anthropology at the London School.
¢  Words are tools, and the ‘meaning’ of a tool is its use.
¢  Firth accepted Malinowski’s view of language. Firth uses the word ‘meaning’, which occurs frequently in his writings, in rather bizarre ways.
¢  Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentences that one’s language makes available.
¢  To make this clearer, we may contrast the systemic approach with Chomsky´s approach to grammar. A Chomskyan grammar defines the class of well-formed sentences in a language by providing a set of rules for rewriting symbols as other symbols.

FORMALISM

Formal language theory, the discipline which studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics. Its applications are found in theoretical computer science, theoretical linguistics, formal semantics, mathematical logic, and other areas. 


—A formal grammar is a set of rules for rewriting strings, along with a "start symbol" from which rewriting must start. Therefore, a grammar is usually thought of as a language generator



However, it can also sometimes be used as the basis for a "recognizer"—a function in computing that determines whether a given string belongs to the language or is grammatically incorrect. To describe such recognizers, formal language theory uses separate formalisms, known as automata theory. 


The linguistic formalism derived from Chomsky can be characterized by a focus on innate
universal grammar, and a disregard for the role of stimuli. According to this position,
language use is only relevant in triggering the innate structures

With regard to the tradition, Chomsky’s position can be characterized as a continuation of essential principles of structuralist theory from Sauss...ure. This is particularly the case for Saussure’s principles of abstractness and arbitrariness. In Chomsky’s formalism, though, the principles of abstractness of language structure and the arbitrariness between linguistic structure and meaning are preserved – and the degree of abstractness is increased.

CONTEXT-FREE GRAMMAR

The formalism of context-free grammars was developed in the mid-1950s by Noam Chomsky, and also their classification as a special type of formal grammar.

It provides a simple and mathematically precise mechanism for describing the methods by which phrases in some natural language are built from smaller blocks, capturing the "block structure" of sentences in a natural way. Its simplicity makes the formalism amenable to rigorous mathematical study.

 Important features of natural language syntax such as agreement and reference are not part of the context-free grammar, but the basic recursive structure of sentences, the way in which clauses nest inside other clauses, and the way in which lists of adjectives and adverbs are swallowed by nouns and verbs, is described exactly.

—A formal grammar is a set of formation rules for strings in a formal language. The rules describe how to form strings from the language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. 


A grammar describes the form of these strings.


Generative Linguistics


Generative linguistics includes a set of explanatory theories developed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. It opposes the behaviorist theory and structuralism. It is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar.
Generative theory is distinguished from other traditions by distinguishing competence and performance, which distinguishes in the act of speech its linguistic capacity. Thus, under this approach, each speaker has a linguistic organ specialized in the analysis and production of complex structures forming the speech.
Generative linguistics comprehend 4 different sides:
  • Generative grammar
  • Generative semantics
  • Transformational grammar.
  • Universal grammar
Different people use the term “generative grammar” in different ways, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping, meanings.
Formally, a generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit. It is a finite set of rules that can be applied to generate all those and only those sentences that are grammatical in a given language.
The term generative grammar is also used to label the approach to linguistics taken by Chomsky and his followers.
The term "ge(ne)rative linguistics" is often applied to the earliest version of Chomsky's transformational grammar, which was associated with a distinction between the "deep structure" and "surface structure" of sentences.
It is a description of a language emphasizing a semantic deep structure that is logical in form, that provides syntactic structure, and that is related to surface structure by transformations.
Generative semantics is the name of a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky:
Or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific transformational grammars.
A transformational grammar has 3 major kinds of rules:
Syntactic rules: which specify the deep structure into a surface structure of the sentence and then transform that deep structure into a surface structure.
Semantic rules: which provide an interpretation for the sentence.
Phonological rules: which specify information necessary in pronouncing the sentence.
Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have. The theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught. There is still much argument whether there is such a thing and what it would be.


 The activity of this topic is in this page: http://www.educaplay.com/es/recursoseducativos/565000/generative_linguistics.htm 
Good luck :D

The Copenhagen School


The Copenhagen School, officially the "Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague)", was a group of scholars dedicated to the study of structural linguistics founded by Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Brøndal. In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centers of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and the Prague School.
The Copenhagen School of Linguistics evolved around Louis Hjelmslev and his developing theory of language, glossematics. Together with Viggo Brødal he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague a group of linguists based on the model of the Prague Linguistic Circle.
Within the circle the ideas of Brøndal and Hjelmslev were not always compatible and Hjelmslevs more formalist approach attracted a group of followers, principal among them Hans Jørgen Uldall and Eli Fischer Jørgensen, who would strive to apply Hjelmslevs abstract ideas of the nature of language to analyses of actual linguistic data.
The basic theoretical framework, called Glossematics was laid out in Hjelmslevs two main works: "Prolegomena to a theory of Language" and "résumé of a theory of Language."
In 1989 a group of members of the Copenhagen Linguistic circle inspired by the advances in cognitive linguistics and the functionalist theories of Simon C. Dik founded the School of Danish Functional Grammar aiming to combine the ideas of Hjelmslev and Brøndal, and other important Danish linguists such as Paul Diderichsen and Otto Jespersen with modern functional linguistics.
Among the prominent members of this new generation of the Copenhagen School of Linguistics were Peter Harder, Elisabeth Engberg Petersen, Frans Gregersen and Michael Fortescue, and the basic work of the school is "Danish Functional Grammar."
Louis Hjelmslev (October 3, 1899, Copenhagen – May 30, 1965, Copenhagen) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structural theory of language which he called glossematics, which developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism, it is interested only in describing the formal characteristics of language, and a high degree of logical rigour.
Hjelmslev and a group of Danish colleagues founded the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen on September 24, 1931. Their main inspiration was the Prague Linguistic Circle, which had been founded in 1926. It was, in the first place, a forum for discussion of theoretical and methodological problems in linguistics. Initially, their interest lay mainly in developing an alternative concept of the phoneme, but it later developed into a complete theory which was coined glossematics, and was notably influenced by structuralism. Membership of the group grew rapidly and a significant list of publications resulted, including an irregular series of larger works under the name Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague.
In his general grammar, Hjelmslev tries to articulate the basic principles for a description of language as form. The grammar itself is a system of forms from which the specific forms of any natural language can be generated.
These forms are obtained inductively from an analysis of the syntactical chain. Although his book on case foregrounds morphology and semantics, Hjelmslev still attempts to isolate a few formal features from which all possible manifestations of case can be constructed through calculated combinations.
The center of a given case system, called an intensive case, is established inductively, but it acquires its status as a true linguistic element only through the system to which it belongs.
Such systems of interrelated elements function according to two general language-specific structural principles:
1. The differences between the elements are more fundamental than the elements themselves; and
2. The elements enter into the system through participation—that is, certain cases, called extensive cases, can absorb or take over the role of the intensive cases, or they might occupy a neutral position, being alternatively extensive and intensive.


 The activity of this topic is in this page: http://www.educaplay.com/es/recursoseducativos/564986/the_copenhagen_school.htm

Grammatical Cases

Charles J. Fillmore (born 1929) is an American linguist, and an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Fillmore has been extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics. He was a proponent of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar during its earliest transformational grammar phase. He was one of the founders of cognitive linguistics, and developed the theories of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), and Frame Semantics (1976).
He was one of the first linguists to introduce a representation of linguistic knowledge that blurred this strong distinction between syntactic and semantic knowledge of a language. He introduced what was termed case structure grammar and this representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists.

A Grammar Case is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence, or number of subjects, objects, etc., of a verb and the grammatical context it requires.
The system was created by the American linguist Charles J. Fillmore in (1968), in the context of Transformational Grammar. This theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases (semantic roles) such as Agent, Object, Benefactor, Location or Instrument, which is required by a specific verb.

According to Fillmore, each verb selects a certain number of deep cases which form its case frame. Thus, a case frame describes important aspects of semantic valency, of verbs, adjectives and nouns.
Case frames are subject to certain constraints, such as that a deep case can occur only once per sentence.
Some of the cases are obligatory and others are optional. Obligatory cases may not be deleted, at the risk of producing ungrammatical sentences.

A fundamental hypothesis of case grammar is that grammatical functions, such as subject or object, are determined by the deep, semantic valence of the verb, which finds its syntactic correlate in such grammatical categories as Subject and Object, and in grammatical cases such as Nominative, Accusative, etc.
Fillmore puts forwards the following hierarchy for a universal subject selection rule:
Agent < Instrumental < Objective
That means that if the case frame of a verb contains an agent, this one is realized as the subject of an active sentence.

Case grammar is an attempt to establish a semantic grammar.
Using a modified form of valency theory Fillmore suggests that the verb establishes a set of cases in a sentence: these are like slots, which usually need not all be filled.
For example, let’s consider these sentences:
1. Mary opened the door with a key.
2. Mary opened the door.
3. A key opened the door.
4. The door opened.
In (1) the semantic cases are: Mary - agent; the door - object; a key - instrument.
In (2) they are as in (1), except that there is no instrument.
In (3) the cases are: a key - instrument; the door - object.
In (4) the only case is the door - object.
In other words, to open requires at the minimum that the object be specified in a sentence. 



So, let's see if you remember something, here's a quiz. Good luck! 

Functional Linguistics

Prague School.
· This is the school of linguistic thought and analysis was established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius. It included among its most prominent members the Russian linguist Nikolay Trubetskoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson; this school was mostly active during the 1920s and ’30s.
· Linguists of the Prague school stress the function of elements within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts, and they have distinguished themselves in the study of sound systems. They developed distinctive-feature analysis of sounds.
· The members of The Prague School thought of language as a whole as serving a purpose.
· They tried to go beyond description to explanations, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.
· The Prague School argues for system in diachrony and it claims that linguistics change is determined by synchronic état de langue.

Trubetzkoy
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (Russian; Moscow, April 16, 1890 - Vienna, June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology. He was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message. He followed his Viennese philosopher collage Karl Bühler, who distinguish between the representation of function (that stating facts), the expressive function (that of expressing temporary or permanent characteristics of the speaker), and the conative function (that of influencing the hearer).  

Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (October 11, 1896, Moscow – July 18, 1982, Boston) is a scholar of Russian origin; he took his first degree, in Oriental languages, at Moscow University.
Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology. He went on to apply a technique of analysis to syntax and morphology, and he proposed that they should be extended to semantics, which is the study of meaning in language.
 In order to substantiate his belief, that the phonological universals he discusses are determined by “deep” psychological principles rather than by relatively uninteresting facts about oral anatomy or the like, Jakobson devotes considerable space to discussion of synaesthetic effects in which cases where perceptions in one sensory mode (speech-sound) correlate with perceptions in another mode (Jakobson considers mainly associations of sounds with colors).
Readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative “systems”, “registers” or “styles”; where American Descriptivists rended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system. Consider, as a very crude example of the problem, the treatment of non-naturalized foreign loan-words. Nasal vowels are not usual in English, so a Descriptivist would find it difficult to justify the omission of /Ʒ/ from a phonemic analysis of English.
Functions of Language

The functions of a language are determined by six factors, which are:
1.    Referential
2.    Emotive
3.    Conative
4.    Phatic
5.    Metalingual
6.    Poetic

Now, I've done an activity for you to have some fun and learn a little more so, ENJOY!

sábado, 26 de noviembre de 2011

Language

In the discipline of linguistics there have been three major directions in linguistics in the past two centuries. D: Let's tlak about it...

Historical linguistics.Before the 19th century, language in the western world was to interest to philosophers. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language.
Plato is said to have been the first person to distinguish between nouns and verbs, how cool is that?

1786 is the year which many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics. Pretty old, huh?

On the 27th of September, 1786, and Englishman, Sir Willian Jones, read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta pointing out that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all had striking structural similarities. but, although Jones has the credit of making this discovery, it was an idea that was occurring independently to several scholars at the same time.

Now, for another hundred years, all other linguistic work was eclipsed by the general preoccupation with writing comparative grammars, grammars which FIRST compared the different linguistic forms found in the various members of the Indo-European language family, and SECOND, attempted to set up a hypothetical ancestor, PRoto-Indo-European, from which all these languages were descended.

Now let me tell you about the Descriptive Linguistics. (:
In the 20th century, the emphasis shifted from language change to language description. Instead of looking at how a selection of items changed in a number o different laguages, linguistics began to concentrate on describing single languages at one particular point in time.

If ay one person can be held responsible for this change of emphasis, it should be the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure, who is sometimes labelled as ''the father of modern linguistics''.
when he died, he didn't left any important work on general linguistics, but before you feel sad, let me tell you that his students collected together his lecture notes after his death and published the under the title General Linguistics, which exerted a major influence on the course of linguistics.
his insistence that language is a careflly built structure of intervowen elements initiated the era of the amazing structural linguistics.
The term ''structural linguistics'' does not necessarily refer to a separate branch or school of linguistics. ALL linguistics since de Saussure ins structural, as ''structural'' in this sense it merely means the recognition that language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements, rather than a collection of unconnected individual items.

Leonard Bloomfield considered that linguistics should deal objectively and systematically with obsvervable data. so he was more interested in the way items arrand than in meaning.
-By around 1950, linguistics had lost touch with other disciplines and become and abstruse subject of little interest to anyone outside it. It was ready for a revolution. Hell yeah!!

Let's now talk a little bit about the Generative Linguistics and the Search for Universals.
In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky, a teacher at hte Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a book called Syntactic Structures. This little book started a revolution in linguistics. Chomsky is the MOST influential linguist of the century, he is the linguist whose reputation has spread furtest outside linguistics.
Chomsky has shifted attention away from detailed descriptions of actual utterances, and started asking questions about the nature of the system which produces the output.
A grammar should be more than a description of old utterances. it should also take it into account possible fot further utterances.
A grammar which consists of a set of statements or rules which specify sequences of a language are possible, and which impossible, is a generative grammar. Chomsky initiated the era of generative linguistics.

The particular type of generative grammar favoured by Chomsky is a so-called transformational one. tha basic characteristics of transformational-generative grammar.
chomsky has not only initiated the era of generative grammars. He has also redirected attention towards language universals. He points out that as all humans are rather similar, their internalized language mechanisms are likely to have important common properties.
chomsky has given the label Universal Grammar to this inherited core, and he regards it as a major task of linguistics to specify what it consists of.
The search of a universal generative grammar is a general characteristic of theoretical linguistics at hte present time, and various proposals have been made.