1. Philology and Linguistics

PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS

Philology - the study of literature and linguistics focused on a specific language. Started earlier.

Linguistics

• the study of the human capacity for language

• search for language universals (properties that all languages share)

• the study of language as such

Implicit knowledge
(what you know intuitively without necessarily realizing so)

Explicit knowledge

(being able to describe and explain how things work)

LINGUISTIC LEVELS

Phonetics

• You can produce and recognize the sound of your language

Phonology

• You know how the sounds of your language work together

Morphology

• You know what parts are words made of and what the individual parts mean

Syntax

• You can produce and interpret well-formed (grammatical) sentences

Semantics

• You can determine the meaning of a sentence

Pragmatics

• You know how context affects the meaning of sentences

LANGUAGE COMPETENCE

• The ABILITY to put your thoughts into words (to encode)

• OR: the ABILITY to understand the meaning of someone else’s words (to decode)

L PERFORMANCE

• Actually using your competence

• Depends on sleep, stress, focus

What is language?

• Difficult to define, we need to talk about what is it rather than a function

• Linguist must difine the object of their interest

Design features of language

the first ones are communication in general, the last ones it talks about human L in particular

• Mode (way the message gets transsimtted- written, speech)

• Advantage of speaking – free hands, easily catch someones attention

• Disadvantage – speaking during running – hard to breathe

• Semancity (language convey meaning/information)

• Cultural transmission (transmisson between generations, a part is genetic transmisson= what we were born with, cultural transmission means we learn it after birth from our parents/family)

• Arbitrariness (arbitrary – „random“) the particular form chosem arbitrarily to represent the given meaning, one does not determine the other (po – czech means after, in french means skin)

Exceptions:

• onomatopoeic words – immitating the sound, there is a similarity with the thing you are immitating (but it is not for 100% - sneeze is different)

• „sound symbolism“ – sounds themselves gives us a feel, two names and most of us gave the one name to a bigger guy

• Reduplication – not often in English or Czech (vid – adding a „vát“)

• Swahili: piga „to strike“; pigapiga „to strike repeatedly“

• Czech: malinkatý > malililinkatý

• Discreteness – each sound is distinct from another

• Duality of patterning - one level of speech sounds, but they mean anything, when you combine them (=duality of patterning) they have some meaning

• Level 1 - speech sounds

• English – 30 speech sounds (moderate amount to recognise them and pronounce them right)

• Two extremes: minimum – 10, maximum – 120 speech sounds

• Level 2 – their combinations (we combine them in a potentially infinite number of ways)

• Productivity

• We combine speech sounds in a potentially infinite number of ways => we can invent new words (finding a new flower)

• Every day we are making new sentences and combination of sentences (=texts)