Historical overview

Learnability

• Jakobson – interest in language acquisition and loss (due to aphasia)

  • Predictions based on markedness

    • Marked phenomena more difficult to learn / take longer, more likely to get lost than the unmarked ones

    • Unmarked learned first (babbling: CV, final devoicing at first)

• Applied to second language acquisition too

  • Codas are marked CVC(C)

    • Italian accent in English: insert V – it’s a bigga day

    • Chinese accent in English: delete coda Cs – my bes frien

  • Voiced obstruents (stops, fricatives, affricates) are marked

    • Czech, German accent in En: devoice codas – a bick friend

Morphological typology

• Not invented by Skalička but signigicantly developed

  • Isolating (~ analytic)

  • Flexive (~ fusional)

    • Introflexive

  • Agglutinating

  • Polysynthetic

  • Functional sentence perspective

• Above the level of a single sentence – textual level

• Once upon a time there was a king. The king had a beautiful daughter, the princess. But the princess was very spoilt.

• Theme –> rheme

• Theme: no new info, just what the rheme is about

• Rheme: the core of the message – the new info for the listener

• Universal among Ls: using the theme and rheme, and putting rheme last in a neutral statement

• Language-specific: Achieving the order (L typology)

• What did Dostoyevsky write?

Dostojevský napsal Zločin a trest.

Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment.

Who wrote C. and P.? Zločin a trest napsal Dostojevský.

*Crime and Punishment wrote Dostoyevsky.

Dostoyevsky [intonation] wrote Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment was written by Dostoyevsky.

it was Dostoyevsky who wrote Crime and Punishment. …