Welcome to Ming Chuan University!

1. Welcome to Ming Chuan University!

2. Introduction to Linguistics • Teacher: Simon Smith (史尚明) • “Dr Smith”, “Simon” or “老師”: OK • “Smith” or “Teacher”: not OK • This semester’s course: • the basics of linguistic analysis • the sounds of languages • the structure of sentences and individual words • the study of meaning.

3. About me… • I first came to Taiwan in 1991 • BA in Linguistics and Chinese, Leeds • MSc in Machine Translation, Manchester • PhD in Statistical Language Modeling, Birmingham • Post-doctoral year at Academia Sinica • This is my third year at Ming Chuan

4. Why study Linguistics? • Linguistics: related to your English studies • But also a science • The scientific study of language • You will get a good grasp of linguistic principles • You will understand more about how languages (including English and Chinese) work. • Linguistics asks such questions as • How did language begin? • Why is it easy for kids to learn their first language, but difficult for adults? • What exactly is language? • That one, we begin to answer next week!

5. Why take this course? • It’s taught (mostly) in English • Your English reading, writing, listening and speaking will all improve • It’s taught in a Western way: you will • think critically • discuss issues with classmates and teacher • question what classmates, teacher and even famous linguists say • You will learn to • describe your own ideas, and others’ ideas, in a logical way, by giving a presentation to the class • write a medium-length essay, in the Western tradition (probably not until next semester)

6. Course grades • In-class or homework exercises every two weeks or so • Quizzes will be announced in advance: probably there will be two • Midterms and finals will take place in class time (if the university gives me permission!)

7. Course grades • Presentations • you will research one language on the web or in the library, and give a short talk • You cannot choose English, Mandarin or Taiwanese • If you want to choose a language, tell me soon • I will give more information later • Class performance • Attitude • Attendance • Contribution to discussion

8. Class rules • Attendance is mandatory • Assistant class leader please take attendance at break time • More than 4 missed classes (whether for sickness, sports, laziness, 病假, 公假, or any reason) – 0%! • If you arrive late, you must apologize and explain the reason • Please don’t eat hot food • Please switch off your phone • Please don’t chatter while I’m speaking • Work only on class material during class time

9. Class website • http://mcu.edu.tw/~ssmith • Here you will find • These PowerPoint slides • Syllabus, recommended reading and websites • Your grades • Check grades on-line after quizzes and exercises are returned to you

10. Textbook • Yule, The Study of Language (Cambridge, 2006) • There should be enough copies in the store • You must buy a copy • You must bring it next week and every week

11. Course syllabus

12. Next semester: • We will look at some other topics • Psycholinguistics • Sociolinguistics • Computational linguistics • Corpus linguistics • There are a lot of flavors of linguistics!

13. But this semester… • We’ll look at the different linguistic strata (layers) Linguistics Sounds of language Grammar Meaning Phonetics Phonology Morphology Syntax Semantics Pragmatics

14. 我覺得這個教室太熱! • A standard way to express this phonetically • ㄨㄛˇ ㄐㄩㄝˊ ㄉㄜ˙ ㄓㄜˋ ㄍㄜ˙ㄐㄧㄠˋ ㄕˋ ㄊㄞˋ ㄖㄜˋ • Another way, using Hanyu Pinyin • wo3 jue2 de5 zhe4 ge5 jiao4 shi4 tai4 re4 • In phonetics terms, this utterance (=sentence) contains • vowels (like ㄜ) • and consonants (like ㄉ) • There are also semivowels (like ㄨ) • And there are diphthongs (ㄧㄠ,ㄞ) • And there is information about the tone (=pitch)

15. 我覺得這個教室太熱! - morphology • A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning • 教 and 室 have meanings (although 室 is not normally used independently as a word) • so, 教 and 室 are morphemes • and they can be put together to form a word: 教室 • If the utterance had been 我們覺得… • we would say that 我們 has two morphemes, 我 and 們 • 們 is called a plural morpheme

16. 我覺得這個教室太熱! - syntax • We can also say • 這個教室,我覺得太熱! • I don’t think we can really say • ?我把這個教室覺得太熱, because it sounds very strange • And we certainly can’t say something like • *我覺得太熱這個教室, although we might understand it if someone said it • But if someone said • *教室這個,太熱覺得我, we would probably have no idea what they were talking about • This is because of syntactic rules governing Mandarin.

17. And now, a semantic example • You can choose different words, and get more or less the same meaning • Like 好熱, or 非常熱, or 熱得不得了 • But some lexical choices (=possible words) are not available: • 我覺得這(*位)教室太熱 • 我覺得這個教室太(*燙) • This is because the classifier 位 selects a human noun • And because 燙 modifies substances like liquids, not spaces like rooms

18. In pragmatics • 我覺得這個教室太熱! • Is it only a comment on the temperature? • Or does it really mean something like • Please can you turn the air-conditioning on? • In English, I’m not sure can mean No • And 我可能不去 generally means “I’m not going” • Pragmatics tells us to look beyond the sentence to find the real meaning

19. In your free time • Look at the diagram again, and try to understand it. Linguistics Sounds of language Grammar Meaning Phonetics Phonology Morphology Syntax Semantics Pragmatics

20. And take a look at 分支学科 • On this website • http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%AF%AD%E8%A8%80%E5%AD%A6%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5 • Get some practice reading simplified Chinese! • And read about Animals and Human Languages” in Chapter 2 of your book.

21. Introducing Linguistics • What do linguists do? • Grammar, and other aspects of language • Relationships between languages • How is linguistics used in the real world?

22. What do linguists do? • They don’t necessarily “learn languages” • Linguist and 語言學 are confusing terms • They are often interested in the structure of languages. They might • specialize in one language, or a group of languages • compare different languages • study features shared by all languages

23. Many linguists study grammar • Syntax • the way words are arranged to make sentences • John had lunch / *John lunch had • Morphology • the way words are modified to fit the circumstances • John had lunch / *John have lunch • Linguists study • what people actually say • not what they “should” say!

24. The sort of things linguists look at in syntax • Syntax (the way words are arranged to make sentences) • John saw the girl with the telescope • 爸爸給小明買鹹蛋超人

25. And in morphology… • Affixation: hardly used in Chinese • My son has 73 Ultramen • 我(?的)兒子有73只鹹蛋超人(*們) • Compounding • rare in English: greenhouse, blackbird • productive in Chinese • Verb-object compounds: 開車, 幫忙 • Resultative compounds: 來得及, 跑不掉 • Stump compounds: 交大

26. Phonology: the sounds of a language • Has 台灣國語 lost the sounds ㄓㄔㄕ? • Why do we sometimes hear • ㄧ、ㄦˋ 、ㄕㄢ、ㄕˋ?

27. Historical linguistics • How languages are related • Language families • Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan… • Areal linguistics • Greek, Bulgarian • Mostly borrowed words; also shared grammatical features • Chinese, Korean, Japanese • How language changes over time • sounds: poor vs paw, suit. • vocab: 咖啡, 颱風. Calque: 摩天大樓, skyscraper, gratte-ciel • grammar: Did you eat yet? Adversative passive 被

28. Sociolinguistics • Diglossia: “high” and “low” prestige languages • The role of Mandarin and Taiwanese in a bilingual society • The changing role of English in Taiwan society: borrowing, or showing off? • case and size: code-switching, or lexicalized Chinese words? Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching

29. Applications for linguistics • Speech disorders • Forensic linguistics • Accent detection • Style verification (eg police style) • Language teaching • Computational applications • Machine translation • Speech recognition and synthesis • Language identification