Historical linguistics Language classification and change

Classification Genetic Typological Areal

A very important discovery Jones [1788] described Sanskrit:  Sanskrit has a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity … than could possibly have been produced by accident.

Language families “Family trees”: linguists love trees! The world has many (how many?) languages They can be traced back to a small number of families –Which families do English and Chinese belong to? The word “family” is used to describe different levels, so it is vague –The highest level node can also be referred to as the Proto-language, for example PIE

Cognates Words from the same root –Maternal and madre both come from mater –(which 3 languages, please?) Yule show how linguists can rebuild PIE and other proto-languages Read “Word Reconstruction” carefully Understand the example Do study question 3, including the reasons

Change in grammar and vocabulary Read about Syntactic changes and Semantic changes Try Research Task D

Typological classification SVO SOV… –6 possible types Pro-drop vs non-pro-drop –Can you remember this? What is Chinese? Accusative (Japanese, Latin) vs ergative (Basque) (from wikipedia.org) (Japanese? German?)

Areal linguistics There is no genetic relationship between languages, but they still share features, and they are spoken in the same region Balkan linguistic union –Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian are all IE languages –However, they are not closely related –And yet they share certain grammatical features (case, tense etc.)

East Asian sprachbund Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai and others are probably unrelated genetically (like Chinese & English, also unrelated) Various shared features –Tone –Classifiers –Monosyllabic morphemes –Topic-comment constructions こちらは 田中さんです。 你的衣服, 怎么这么脏 ? (wiki again) –Politeness (changing in Chinese)

Lexical borrowing Lots of languages borrow extensively from English You can probably think of many words in Chinese… how about the other way round? This is not really part of language classification though Domain-specific borrowing –Legal / administrative vocab zh  vn –Cooking fr  en –Philosophy de  en Calque –Skyscraper  gratte-ciel (fr), Wolkenkratzer (de), 摩天樓 (zh) –Brainwash, runway (can you say why?)

English  Chinese loans Phonologically similar –Easy to think of many examples Calque/phonological hybrid – 冰淇淋 蹦及 –Cross-straits difference 電子郵件, 伊媚兒, SIZE, CASE Taiwan Office English (why??) – 麻煩你把 candidate 的 resume fax 給我, 我明天要 interview 他.

Sociolinguistics

Variation in language What are –Accent? –Dialect? –Language? Draw a tree –For English (me) –For Chinese (students) Give some examples of lexical differences, from English and Chinese.

Social factors in accent Differences in accent –What are the 3 main reasons one accent differs from another? Place; ____; ____. Accent differences –Taiwan Mandarin vs standard Mandarin –English Labov (1987) investigated “4 th floor” pronunciation, in NYC –3 department stores (Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, and Klein’s) –“higher class” speakers pronounce the /r/ Trudgill (1974) in the UK –Found that “higher class” speakers do not pronounce the /r/

Register: describe the differences, please Would you mind giving me your full attention please? –Shut up! I am writing to inform you –Just wanted to let you know That is truly marvelous –That really rocks (what does rock mean?) t/v distinctions

Diglossia This happens in a bilingual society Each variety is used –With different people –In different situations –Or for different purposes An easy example of this phenomenon, please? Usually there is said to be an H. variety, and an L. variety. Can you guess what H. and L. mean? Also Singapore; Philippines; England in the Middle Ages; many other examples

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (almost certainly incorrect, but interesting anyway! Sapir and Whorf, in the 1930s, said that language determines culture –Hopi (American Indian language) has a feature +/- animate –Hopi words for cloud and stone are animate –Whorf concluded that clouds and stones are animate in the Hopi world-view Can you disprove the S-W hypothesis, using the knowledge you have of Spanish, French, Hungarian or German?

What was that all about? Definition of language Description of the different levels of language. Analyzing –Sounds –Words –Sentences –Meaning

And then… Language and the mind –How language is acquired –How things sometimes go wrong Today’s introduction to historical linguistics and language in society Thanks for coming!