'Our pupils do NOT speak Doric, they speak Aberdonian!’

First impressions of a sociophonetic study of adolescents in Aberdeen

Thorsten BratoDepartment of English

GieІen Graduate School for the HumanitiesJustus-Liebig-Universität GieІen

Monday 2nd OctoberTaylor A31, 5.00-6.00pm

All welcome

details of other upcoming CLR seminars at www.abdn.ac.uk/langling/seminars

AT4013- Language in Culture and Society

• Class reps?

• Course guide, readings

• Lecture-tutorials

• Assignments

• My work on language and culture, ethnopoetics, descriptive grammar

What is Language?

Something we do all the time without reflection.

Teaching our language to someone who doesn’t know it is hard

Competence = this ‘hidden knowledge’

Performance = what we can see people doing

What is Language?

A dialect with an army.

Africa 2,092 Americas 1,002 Asia 2,269 Europe 239 Pacific 1,310 TOTAL 6,912 www.ethnologue.com

What is the origin of Language?

Best guess seems that language developed in parallel with the species.

We don’t know and we can never know.

Bad question.

Origins don’t necessarily explain what’s going on

Some definitions of LanguageSapir: “a purely human and non-instinctive method of

communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.”

Bloch & Trager: “a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.”

Hall: “the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols.”

Chomsky: “a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.”

Communication Systems

All: 1. A mode of communication

2. Semanticity/Meaning

3. Pragmatic function

Some: 4. Interchangeability

5. Cultural transmission

6. Arbitrariness

7. Discreteness

Human 8. Displacement

Language 9. Productivity

What is Linguistics?

Anthropology studies human beings in the round

Linguistics studies language in all its forms.Description of languages

Theory of Language

Historical connections from Grammar, philology

Has many contemporary connectionsPhilosophy, history, archeology, literature, anthropology, sociology, psychology, neuropsychology, biology, physics, mathematics, computer programming

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913 )

Swiss linguist, working on Indo-European philology came to reinvent the system, the way language is theorized.

Course in General Linguistics posthumously compiled from notes and lecture notes of his students.

Modern structuralism - rules of relations among elements

Semiology (semiotics)

Competence and Performance

Language is more than rules.Not just vocabulary and grammar.

Saussure’s langue and parole

Language and speakingLanguage is a social system, shared by a speech community

Speaking always happens in a context

Study Language (langue) not speech (parole)

“The subject matter of linguistics comprises all manifestations of human speech, whether that of savages or civilized nations, or of archaic, classical or decadent periods.”

1) Describe all observable languages

2) Trace their histories (families), reconstruction

3) Determine permanent, universal forces, deduce general laws

4) Delimit and define the discipline

Saussurian Duality of Language

1) Oral - aural pairing

2) Union of sound-image and concept

3) individual and social

4) Synchronic and diachronic realitiesAn established system on the one hand

Always a product of the past

Langue is the true object of study

Parole (speech, speaking, articulation) is messy, heterogeneous, variable, based in the individual, changing

Langue (language, competence) “is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty.”

Social crystallization of langue

“Among all the individuals that are linked together by speech, some sort of average will be set up: all will reproduce—not exactly of course, but approximately—the same signs united with the same concepts.”

The social, the essential

Not the individual, accidental, accessory

Two people conversing

Semiotic circuit

langue is no less concrete than parole

“Whereas speech is heterogeneous, language, as defined is homogeneous. It is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images, and in which both parts of the sign are psychological.

linguistic signs are not abstractions

Two modes of analysis

Synchronic - description of the state of a language at a particular moment

Diachronic - change through time, comes from comparing sequences of synchronic analyses

Antecedents are not origins

Linguistics as a model for general semiology

“Language is comparable to a symphony in that what the symphony actually is stands completely apart from how it is performed; the mistakes that musicians make in playing the symphony do not compromise this fact.”

Saussurian principles

Language is form, not substance

Units of language can only be defined by their relationships

Structuralism first enunciated by Prague School of Linguists following these principles

(Roman Jakobson, Nikolay Trubetskoy)

Semiotic point of view: system of signs

An open-ended, arbitrary symbol system –

A signal is transmitted from a sender to a receiver (or group of receivers) along a channel of communication. The signal will have a particular form and will convey a particular meaning (or message). The connection between form and meaning constitutes a code.

Emile Benveniste explanation of Structuralism

Saussure never uses the word ‘structure’:

“Language is a system that has its own arrangement.”

The system is an interdependent whole.

If one part is modified, the whole system is affected because it remains coherent.

Structuralism

Trubetskoy: “One cannot determine the place of a word in a lexical system until one has studied the structure of the said system.”

A science of the whole - system of relations•system is formed of units that mutually affect one another

• distinguished from other systems by the internal arrangements of these units

• arrangement is structure

French structuralism

Benveniste:

“The structuralist doctrine teaches the predominance of the system over the elements, and aims to define the structure of the system through the relationships among the elements, in the spoken chain as well as in formal paradigms, and shows the organic character of the changes to which language is subject.”

Arbitrariness

Benveniste, ‘Nature of the Linguistic Sign’: • Arbitrariness of the sign is when analyzed across

systems• The linguistic sign is non-arbitrary (necessary)

within the system.• Can’t say just anything and be speaking English.• Natural logic of the system (Whorf)

Langue, parole, langage

langue - languagethe formal system of grammar (code)

parole - speechthe realization of langue in actual talk

langage - language/speechthe overall phenomenon of which langue and parole are subparts

•studies the life of signs within society

•shows what constitute signs, what laws govern them

•language is the prototypical semiological system

Science of signs - semiology

Phonemes

Minimal meaningful contrast in sound.

Smallest unit of meaningful difference in sounds.

“The units which we call ‘phonemes’ are in themselves of no importance: it is the differences among them that count.”

Phonetics

Description of all the sounds in a language

Phonology is the study and theory of sounds in Language

Phonetics websites

www.abdn.ac.uk/langling/resources/phonetics.html

www.paulmeier.com/ipa/charts.htmlor

www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/

top stop little kitten hunter

Phonetics studies and describes perceptible differences

Phonemics analyses meaningful contrasts in sound

Voiced vs. unvoiced is a meaningful contrast in English, carries a heavy functional load

Bit - pit

Done - ton

Could - good

Minimal Pairs highlight phonemic contrasts

Not all differences are meaningful

Aspiration in English is not meaningful

Top - stop

th t

Redundantly associated with voiceless

tab - tap

b - p or ph

Hindi /tali/ = “key”/thali/ = “strip”/kap/ = “cup”/kaph/ = “phlegm”/ph l/ = “fruit”/p l/ = “moment”/b l/ = “strength”

Other languages contrast aspirated and unaspirated

Korean /keda/ = “fold”/kheda/ = “dig out”

StressEnglish: present, object, construct, implant,

Pitch/Tone Chinese

Length Korean: il “day” i:l “work”

seda “to count” se:da “strong”pam “night” pa:m “chestnut”

German: die Stadt, der Staat

More examples of phonemic contrasts

Etic distinctions

External frameworks or universal classificatory grids

• Linguistic typologies (e.g., analytic, inflecting, agglutinating, polysynthetic)

• Linnaean classification of plants & animals (genus, species)

• Disease (medical pathology)

But are these just our (Western) emic categories, deployed universally?

emics

System-internal description and analysis

Explains social or cultural elements according to indigenous definitions/categories

Not the natives’ model Boas’s secondary rationalization, Turner’s exegetical models

Emic models, like phonemes, are constructions formalized by the analyst on the basis of distinctive features present in indigenous usage