Unit 1

Moisés A. Bittner
Phonetics and Phonology
Autumn Term
 What is Linguistics?
 It is the scientific study of human language.

 Aims of linguistic theory:

 What is knowledge of language? (Competence)
 How is knowledge of language acquired? (Acquisition)
 How is knowledge of language put into use? (Performance/Language Processing)

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 Language
‘Language is a purely human and
non-instinctive method of
communicating ideas, emotions
and desires by means of voluntarily
produced symbols.’

Edward Sapir (1884-1939)

Language: An Introduction to the Study of
Speech (1921)

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‘From now on I will consider
language to be a set (finite
or infinite) of sentences,
each finite in length and
constructed out of a finite
set of elements.’

Noam Chomsky (1928-)

Syntactic Structures (1957)

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 Importance of Language
 The most important tool ever invented.

 Distinguishes us from other creatures.

 Provides a medium to think effectively, communicate
interpersonally and collaborate with other people in work.

 Impossible to imagine a world without language.

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Languages of the World

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Hierarchy of Language
 Texts/discourses
 Sentences/utterances
 Clauses
 Phrases
 Words
 Morphemes
 Syllables
 Phonemes

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 Main Branches of Linguistics
 Phonetics
 Phonology
 Morphology
 Syntax
 Semantics Semiotics*

 Pragmatics

* the study of sign and symbol systems.

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 Phonetics
 Phonetics is about the physical aspect of sounds. It studies the
production, transmission, and perception of speech sounds
called phones in all living languages, including:

 Production of speech, that is how speech sounds are actually made:

Articulatory Phonetics
 Transmission of speech sounds (physical characteristics such as
colour, loudness, amplitude, frequency): Acoustic Phonetics.
 Perception of the sounds by human brain: Auditory Phonetics.

 Phonetic transcriptions are done using the square brackets [ ].

 φonos (phonos: sounds) and ikos (ikos: treatise, science, or study).

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 Phonology
 Phonology studies the sound system of specific languages.
 It is about the abstract aspect of sounds and it studies
the phonemes.
 Phonemic transcriptions adopt the slash / /.
 Phonology is about establishing what are the phonemes in a given
language, i.e. those sounds that can bring a difference in meaning
between two words.

 φonos (phonos: sounds), and logos (logos: study)

 Phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, ‘a sound uttered’) is

the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful
contrasts between utterances in spoken language. /tS/

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 Morphology
 Studies the formation of words from smaller units
called morphemes.

 Morpheme: minimal meaningful language unit. (-ed, -ing)

 Grapheme(s): written symbol to represent speech. <ch>

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 Syntax
 The syntax of a language deals with the grammatical
structure of a language.

 Grammar is the structural foundation of our ability to

express ourselves.

 Descriptive grammar: structure actually used by

speakers and writers.
 Prescriptive grammar: structure that should be used.
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 Rules that govern the formation of sentences from words.

 Syntactic phrases include:

 Noun Phrase : a tall man, the bus
 Verb Phrase : travel around, hit the ball
 Prepositional Phrase : in the class, at the club
 Adjective Phrase : Very good, nice girl

 The Grammatical Rules:

 SVO: eg. English
 SOV: eg . Hindi

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 Semantics
 Study of language meaning.

 The study of conventional, ‘compositional meaning’.

 Concerned with not only the meaning of words, but

also that of morphemes and of sentences.

 Lexical semantics study how and what the words of a

language denote.

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 Semantic Relations
Exempli gratia:

 Pretty and attractive are synonyms.

 Good and bad are antonyms.
 Animal is a hypernym of mammal which is a hypernym of dog.
 Dog is a hyponym of mammal which is a hyponym of animal.
 Bark is a meronym of tree which is a meronym of forest.
 Forest is a holonym of tree which is a holonym of bark.

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 Pragmatics

 Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context.

 Pragmatics pays heed to social conventions and cultural norms –

such as those of politeness, formality, and familiarity – and also
to prosody, intonation, facial expressions, and gestures, all of which can
vary considerably from one context to the next.

 Pragmatics, then, is a very broad and multifaceted field concerned with

the communicative functions of language.

 Essentially it is the study of language meaning and use in context:

interpersonal, social, cultural. It takes into account what a speaker
means, implies, and aims to communicate with an utterance. So it is a
particularly important area for language learners.
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 References
 Adapted from: Verma, Apurv & Prasad, Ashish, 2012. Branches of Linguistics. Available at:
http://es.slideshare.net/dapurv5/branches-of-linguistics-11652624

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics

 http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Linguistics

 http://linguistics.wfu.edu/Some_basics.html

 https://sites.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/all-about-linguistics/what-
is-linguistics

 http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/a-pragmatic-note

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