1
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- 20th Century Linguistics, part 2
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2
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- Highly influenced by behaviorism (through behaviorism’s influence on
Bloomfield)
- Language is an autonomous structure in the mind or brain of the speaker
(this is a common link to European Structuralism).
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3
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- Handbook of American Indian Languages
- Boas’ main contribution is that he made the study of American Indian
languages respectable.
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4
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- His view of language is a product of three things
- Historical/Comparative influence
- Description of American Indian languages (esp. Athabaskan &
Uto-Aztecan)
- Study of language by looking at its psychological and logical basis
(European influence)
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5
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- A cross between 19th Century European Structuralism and 20th
Century American Structuralism
- 19th Century Europe: language as a natural (psychological)
phenomenon and philology. Sapir
was heavily influenced by J.G. Herder (German).
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6
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- Sapir saw a need to develop new categories for dealing with American
Indian languages since traditional European grammars just don’t work.
- He also saw a need for a formal basis for studying language (i.e.
linguistic analysis should precede philosophical or logical analyses).
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7
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- Language is situated in the mind of the speakers, so language has a
psychological basis. Also, the
language system is not entirely conscious, but grades between conscious
and unconscious (lexical items are more subject to introspection than
syntax).
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8
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- The sentence is the major part of speech. (This is very similar to Hjelmslev’s
idea about language analysis.)
- Language only exists as it is spoken—SPEECH is the central concept.
- Meaning (thought) comes before speech.
This is in contrast to Boas, Saussure, and Hjelmslev, who
considered semantics to work in tandem with phonology.
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9
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- Studied Pānini’s Sanskrit grammar, which inspired much of his work
in descriptive grammar.
- Descriptive grammar of Tagalog (1914-1917): the first Structuralist
descriptive grammar done in America.
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10
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- Founded the LSA (December 28, 1924)
- Worked extensively on American Indian languages
- Strongly behaviorist
- High-level aspects of language (psychology, logic, and semantics) were
too problematic for his study of linguistics
- Set up the American Structuralist methodology: phonetics/phonology à pragmatics, one level at a time
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11
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- Hierarchical Constituent (Tree) Structure
- Thoughts underlying uttered sentences are primarily holistic unitary
complexes which are analyzed secondarily in language structure. (This comes from Wundt.)
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12
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- The observable data for psychology consist in the behavior of living
organisms.
- Some forms of behavior cannot be explained by direct physical causation.
- Conditioning: assumes the existence of a simple stimulus transfer
mechanism
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13
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- Definition of meaning: “When anything apparently unimportant turns out
to be closely connected with more things, we say that it has, after all,
a ‘meaning’; namely, it ‘means’ these more important things. Accordingly, we say that
speech-utterance, trivial and unimportant in itself, is important
because it has a meaning: the meaning consists of the important things
with which the speech utterance (B) is connected, namely the practical
events (A and C)” (p. 27).
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14
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- Underlying Form: useful in explaining phonological modifications in
morphology.
- The sentence is the largest grammatical unit.
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15
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- Analysis on each level without synthesizing the levels
- Phonology dominant
- Complementary distribution: some allophones are conditioned by their
environment
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16
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- Traditionalists: Kenneth Pike
- In the Middle: Charles Hockett
- Formalists: Zellig Harris
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17
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- Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)
- Tagmemics: functionalist approach to grammar (function-based slots that
can be filled)
- Followed an “Item and Process” approach to phonology
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18
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- Traditional view of subject/predicate: subject=topic; predicate=comment
- Generative rules generate underlying forms, then a different set of
transformational rules generates a surface form.
- Two Models (1954): introduction to “Item and Arrangement” approach to
phonology
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19
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- Applied tree structures to syntax
- ICA—the phrase structure component of Generative Grammar
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20
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- Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951)
- You can get a large corpus of utterances, which you analyze to find
minimal recurrent sound units;
- These recurrent sounds combined into morphemes
- COMBINATORIALITY OF MINIMAL UNITS
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21
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- Origin of Generative Grammar: assign structures at the sentence level;
Harris set up charts that specify which combinations are possible
(grammatical).
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22
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- Decoded the Nazi “Enigma” Machine Durijng WWII.
- The Turing Machine (1937)
- “The Turing Test” (30%+ of time mistaken for a human) (1950)
- Artificial Intelligence Pioneer
- He and David Champernowne wrote the first chess-playing program for
computers.
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