Introduction to Linguistics

An introduction to language and communication

Language and gesture

Gesture and the mind
In this video, Dr Winter talks about the gestures we make while speaking, implying they might
happen in an unconscious way, as people who are on the phone make gestures even though the
other person is not physically there, and even blind people make gestures while speaking to
another blind person.
He says that linguists are interested in co-speech gestures, which are gestures that are connected
to what we are saying. The movement happens at the same time we say what we are thinking. It
happens with all humans.
Five types of gesture
There are five important types of gestures (though there are several ways in which one could
categorize them):
Beat gestures: They don’t seem to carry any particular meaning. They emphasize the beat (or way)
somebody is talking.
Emblems: Gestures that can stand by themselves, but you have to know the meaning of the
gesture in the context it is being used in order to understand it (because if could have a different
meaning in other cultures, for example), thus, they are somewhat arbitrary.
Iconic gestures: Gestures that are quite depictive or representational. They are used to represent
something (size, the form of an object (a box), etc.)
Metaphoric gestures: They can represent abstract things (time, for example).
Pointing gestures: Also called indexical or deictic. Gestures used to indicate where to focus your
attention.
I realized my family mostly uses beat and metaphorical gestures when having a casual
conversation. I saw some other people on the street that did pointing gestures, focusing on
buildings or items at shops. It was easy to use the classification because the gestures are very
different from one another.
Next Wednesday's Meeting
It was interesting to notice how gestures can change our thinking. They are an important part of
our day to day speech, but seeing in a more direct how important they are was impressive.
The experiment was interesting, however, there’s a considerable number of people who don’t
focus on hand expressions, but on the face of the person talking. I don’t know if this only happens
with Mexican people, but because of it, most people in my research assumed the meeting was
going to be next Friday instead of on Monday.
Arbitrariness: Is a linguistic concept that references the fact that there’s nothing in a word itself
that gives away its meaning. A word in a language that means “dog” won’t be the same as the
word that has the same meaning in another language.
Sign: anything that has a meaning.
Not all the things that we do to communicate are arbitrary. This is the case of the iconic gestures.
Regarding the activity:
A picture of a cat in a children’s picture book: Non-arbitrary. The picture of a cat is representing a
cat. It has the image of a cat, there’s nothing more than that. (Unless the text implies that the cat
is representing something else).
Onomatopoeic words like pop and splash: Arbitrary. The onomatopoeic words can be different
depending on the language that is being used. Some of them could be understood between
languages, but it wouldn’t be the case with some others.
A national flag, like the Union Jack to signify the United Kingdom: Arbitrary. The flag would only
represent something for the ones who already know the meaning of it.
A rash on someone’s arm to signify an allergy: Arbitrary. It doesn’t only happen when someone
has an allergy. Although it could be non-arbitrary because whether you are in Mexico or New
Zealand, if someone see that you have a rash, it would represent the same meaning, without
taking into account the language or the cultural differences.
Compound words like haystack, treehouse, and goldfish: Arbitrary. They still don’t have a direct
meaning to the object that they represent.
Myths about Sign Languages
It was interesting, especially because I didn’t know sign languages are not a version of the
language the people in that country speak. I also didn’t know that sign languages exist because
communities of deaf people created them, I thought that they were created in order to help deaf
people.
Because sign languages were created by communities of deaf people, there are different versions
of them across the world. I thought there was a universal sign language before this step.
When watching the narrative being told in ASL, I didn’t understand anything. I tried to assume
some of the gestures and I even thought I had figured out at least a tiny part of the story, but it sill
made no sense whatsoever. The only thing I kind of understood were some of the emotions the
story teller was showing.
She uses facial expressions and gestures mainly.
Dr. Schembri’s commentary really helped me understand many aspects of the video I saw
moments before. I didn’t know about the manual and non-manual aspects of sign language, and
the way he talked about it helped me understand the basics of how sign language works.
Language and ape communication
Language and other animals
The first steps are an introduction to the topic. They say they will talk about the similarities and
differences between humans and apes, focusing on the way humans (and apes) communicate with
one another.
Primate vocalization
In the first video, Dr Pelman talks about Viki, a chimpanzee who was raised like a human and
learned how to pronounce four words and showed us that even though she couldn’t learn how to
speak, she had the ability to throw spitballs or suck from a straw. The chimpanzee had a really
good control on her vocal tract. He also talked about how the scientists considered the possibility
of teaching apes sign language.
Koko’s vocalizations
This step demonstrates how good Koko was at using her vocal tract. She had great control over it,
as she could blow air into his hand or produce grunts whenever she wanted.
Watching her videos made me realize how good Koko was at using her vocal tract. The place of
articulation of what she did amazed me, because she basically used everything we use to create
sounds. Her lips, her tongue and her throat. She doesn’t seem to completely close up her vocal
tract, but she seems to have the ability to make /s/ and /f/ sounds. She doesn’t seem to be able to
produce voiced articulations, but it’s impressive how good she is at hissing and grunting whenever
she wanted to.
Design features of language
Human language is different from communication systems of other animals because:
- It’s arbitrary.
- It’s culturally transmitted. Our language is shaped by our cultural background.
- It involves displacement. We can talk about things unrelated to us, about fictional and
hypothetical things, etc.
- It’s creative.
These seem to be only true in human language, it might happen with some other forms of human
communication, such as sign language, but not with the same freedom of choice and easiness. It
doesn’t seem to happen with other animals. Only we have this ability.
Throughout the week I learned the classification of gestures and how important they are for our
communication. I also learned a lot about sign language, from the fact that it is an actual language
on its own to the idea that they could even be used with apes to try to achieve some form of
communication. I also really enjoyed the information regarding the apes, especially about Koko.
Grammar and psycholinguistics
A psycholinguist is interested in the mental processing of language.
There are things we know that we probably don’t even know that we know.
Professor Dabrowska’s exercise (that lasted approximately 45 minutes) was quite interesting,
because even though it looked like it was going to be easy (and was really easy most if not all the
time), the length and number of questions each part of the test had, ended up making it quite
tedious and tiring. It was interesting, however, reading the questions and realizing there are so
much variations and forms of creating a sentence with the same word forms.
It’s also interesting that she’s conducting this experiment to have a better understanding of the
differences in language processing that exist between natives and non-native speakers.
Are children better language learners than adults?
Children, in many ways, are better language learners than adults. But there are things that adults
are better at too. It all depends on how we test language learning. Adults learn faster at the
beginning and are more goal focused, but children are better in the long run, as children are able
to reach almost-native language knowledge because they are just trying to fit in an reach the goals
their parents, for example, want them to accomplish, whereas adults are not able to do so.
There are lots of variables that we need to take into account when studying how people learn a
language. Studies can have quite different results, as they use different tasks and test different
aspects of linguistic knowledge.
Decorative and functional grammar
Decorative grammar doesn’t add much to the meaning.
Functional grammar contribute in a more direct to the meaning.
Eye-tracking and fixed expressions
Eye tracking can help identify which parts of a text someone is reading is more difficult for this
person. It offers lots of different measurements and can also help to identify how such person
processes individual words and phrases, syntactical structures, etc. This is really helpful because
eye tracking can also help identify which words a person has to read again or had more difficulty
processing. It helps to identify all about the reading a person does. There are some specific terms
for this kind of study. Fixations refers to the movement and position of the eye while reading a
text; the way a word is read but also how much time did it take to understand it In context, etc.
Saccade is the movement of the eye from one point to another. Regressions refers to the action of
re-reading any part of a text. It makes easier to spot the complexity of a text for a person.
Regarding the sets of sentences, it was pretty obvious that the ones with the less known words
were the most difficult to read.
Binomials expressions
They are paired constructions usually with an and in the middle, like fish and chips, or spick and
span. As we usually use these words in the same order they are relatively fixed. But it’s just a
matter of convention.
Some examples are: up, up and away! (trinomial), step by step, black and white, etc.
These conventions help people read them faster, therefore, if you change its order, it’ll be more
difficult for them to process it.
Big data dialectology
Dialectology studies the variation of languages from place-to-place. This is usually measured by
using surveys. Big data dialectology uses a different approach, as it uses information that’s now
available in huge quantities thanks to the new technologies regarding social media. Nowadays it’s
even possible to analyze changes over time or the way a certain word that it’s used by everyone, is
used in a specific place.
This big data dialectology can also be used to do research on new words and track where they
start to be used and how they begin to spread. It can also analyze the changes of words and even
why they are changing and the impact of such words in certain places.
I couldn’t do the activity FutueLearn suggested because the webpage they linked (Quartz) wasn’t
working properly.
Zipf’s law says that a small number of frequent words make up a very large proportion of the total
number of words used in any kind of corpus.