LING 200 Introduction to Linguistics Prof. Sharon Hargus Winter 2009 Jan. 5, 2009

Welcome to LING 200  Plan for today  Syllabus, administrative matters  What is linguistics?  What is grammar? Please turn off your cell phone.

Administrative matters  Syllabus is on class website:

Goals for student learning in this class  Learn about some general properties of human language  Learn some facts about particular languages  Develop competence in linguistic analysis  Learn about some tools for analyzing language

Summary of student responsibilities  Do the assigned work on time  Read the textbook; quiz on reading opens Fridays, closes Tuesdays before section  Homework posted Fridays, due Thursdays in section  No make-up exams  Be respectful of others

What is linguistics and what is a linguist?  Popular/military definitions of linguistics/linguist  Military ‘linguist’ = translator  Popular culture, ‘linguist’ = someone who knows more than one language  Polyglot: someone who speaks more than one language  To linguists, linguistics is the study of human language as a rule-governed system of knowledge

Systems of knowledge in language Two types of knowledge Two types of knowledge  1. List-type knowledge  The meaningful elements you know  horse  Spanish caballo  Sahaptin k’úsi  Linguists, lexicographers make this information explicit in a dictionary

2 nd type of knowledge  2. Rule-type knowledge  The system of rules with which the structure of a language can be described  I.e. ‘grammar’  e.g. rules for plural formation  horses  Spanish caballos  Sahaptin k’úsima

Grammar  Different meanings of ‘grammar’  What “grammar” might mean to you  the right way to write  the right way to speak  Linguists: “prescriptive grammar”  = rules handed down by a supposed “authority” on the right way to write/speak

A prescriptive rule of English  Pronouns referring to animals are not marked for gender: use it instead of he/she etc.  Instead of  “My cat’s name is Peach. He is a bad animal.”  I should say  “My cat’s name is Peach. It is a bad animal.”  But who talks like that???

Linguists’ view  Linguists are interested in what people actually say/sign, not what they are told to say  Any native speaker is an expert on their language  But variation: different varieties (just not "right" vs. "wrong“)  So what do linguists study then?

Descriptive grammar  What speakers/signers actually produce  What speakers/signers judge to be a possible word or sentence  Linguists describe what speakers do/know as a system of rules, a descriptive grammar

Working with Mike Abou in Ft. Ware, B.C. July 2005

Linguists work with data  Previously collected data (corpus studies, philology)  Newly collected data  from self (intuitions)  from others (fieldwork, experiments)

Summary  Linguistics is about  describing languages  documenting lexicon, texts  rules by which language is structured (grammar)  understanding other properties of human language  how do we manage to learn a language?  what makes human language so unique on this planet?

Preview  Some topics we’ll discuss later on in this course  Some languages seem to be more related to each other than other languages.  Is American Sign Language a language? What are its properties?  Lots of languages seem to be going extinct. Why is that happening?  What is computational linguistics?

This week  Sections Tues and Thurs  Wed lecture: Design features of human language  Fri film: Discovering the Human Language  Beginning Wed, bring paper and pencil to lecture to answer a two-minute question at the end of lecture, including Friday film.