Part One: Introduction to Linguistics Every human knows at least one language, spoken or signed.

Linguistics is the science of language, including the sounds, words, and grammar rules. Words in languages are finite, but sentences are not. It is this creative aspect of human language that sets it apart from animal languages, which are essentially responses to stimuli. The rules of a language, also called grammar, are learned as one acquires a language. These rules include phonology, the sound system, morphology, the structure of words, syntax, the combination of words into sentences, semantics, the ways in which sounds and meanings are related, and the lexicon, or mental dictionary of words. When you know a language, you know words in that language, i.e. sound units that are related to specific meanings. However, the sounds and meanings of words are arbitrary. For the most part, there is no relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning. Knowing a language encompasses this entire system, but this knowledge (called competence) is different from behavior (called performance.) You may know a language, but you may also choose to not speak it. Although you are not speaking the language, you still have the knowledge of it. However, if you don't know a language, you cannot speak it at all. There are two types of grammars: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive grammars represent the unconscious knowledge of a language. English speakers, for example, know that "me likes apples" is incorrect and "I like apples" is correct, although the speaker may not be able to explain why. Descriptive grammars do not teach the rules of a language, but rather describe rules that are already known. In contrast, prescriptive grammars dictate what a speaker's grammar should be and they include teaching grammars, which are written to help teach a foreign language. There are about 5,000 languages in the world right now (give or take a few thousand), and linguists have discovered that these languages are more alike than different from each other. There are universal concepts and properties that are shared by all languages, and these principles are contained in the Universal Grammar, which forms the basis of all possible human languages.

Part Two: Morphology and Syntax Morphemes are the minimal units of words that have a meaning and cannot be subdivided further. There are two main types: free and bound. Free morphemes can occur alone and bound morphemes must occur with another morpheme. An example of a free morpheme is "bad", and an example of a bound morpheme is "ly." It is bound because although it has meaning, it cannot stand alone. It must be attached to another morpheme to produce a word. Free morpheme: bad Bound morpheme: ly Word: badly When we talk about words, there are two groups: lexical (or content) and function (or grammatical) words. Lexical words are called open class words and include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. New words can regularly be added to this group. Function words, or closed class words, are conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns; and new words cannot be (or are very rarely) added to this class.

Affixes are often the bound morpheme. This group includes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes. Prefixes are added to the beginning of another morpheme, suffixes are added to the end, infixes are inserted into other morphemes, and circumfixes are attached to another morpheme at the beginning and end. Following are examples of each of these: Prefix: re- added to do produces redo Suffix: -or added to edit produces editor Infix: -um- added to fikas (strong) produces fumikas (to be strong) in Bontoc Circumfix: ge- and -t to lieb (love) produces geliebt (loved) in German There are two categories of affixes: derivational and inflectional. The main difference between the two is that derivational affixes are added to morphemes to form new words that may or may not be the same part of speech and inflectional affixes are added to the end of an existing word for purely grammatical reasons. In English there are only eight total inflectional affixes: -s 3rd person singular present she waits she waited she's eating she has eaten three apples Lori's son you are taller you are the shortest

-ed past tense -ing progressive -en past participle -s -'s -er plural possessive comparative

-est superlative

The other type of bound morphemes are called bound roots. These are morphemes (and not affixes) that must be attached to another morpheme and do not have a meaning of their own. Some examples are ceive in perceive and mit in submit. English Morphemes A. Free 1. Open Class 2. Closed Class B. Bound 1. Affix a. Derivational b. Inflectional 2. Root There are six ways to form new words. Compounds are a combination of words, acronyms are derived from the initials of words, back-formations are created from removing what is mistakenly considered to be an affix, abbreviations or clippings are shortening longer words, eponyms are created from proper nouns (names), and blending is combining parts of words into one.

Compound: doghouse Acronym: NBA (National Basketball Association) or scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) Back-formation: edit from editor Abbreviation: phone from telephone Eponym: sandwich from Earl of Sandwich Blending: smog from smoke and fog Grammar is learned unconsciously at a young age. Ask any five year old, and he will tell you that "I eat" and "you eat," but his "dog eats." But a human's syntactical knowledge goes farther than what is grammatical and what is not. It also accounts for ambiguity, in which a sentence could have two meanings, and enables us to determine grammatical relationships such as subject and direct object. Although we may not consciously be able to define the terms, we unconsciously know how to use them in sentences. Syntax, of course, depends on lexical categories (parts of speech.) You probably learned that there are 8 main parts of speech in grammar school. Linguistics takes a different approach to these categories and separates words into morphological and syntactic groups. Linguistics analyzes words according to their affixes and the words that follow or precede them. Hopefully, the following definitions of the parts of speech will make more sense and be of more use than the old definitions of grammar school books. Open Class Words Nouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs _____ + plural endings Det. Adj. _____ (this is called a Noun Phrase) "dogs" "the big dog" ____ + tense endings "speaks" ____ + er / est "small" Adj. + ly "quickly" Aux. ____ (this is called a Verb Phrase) "have spoken" Det. ____ Noun "the smaller child" ____ Adj. or Verb or Adv. "quickly ran"

Closed Class Words Determiners Auxiliary Verbs Prepositions Conjunctions a, an, the, this, that, these, ____ Adj. Noun those, pronouns, quantities "this blue book" forms of be, have, may, can, shall at, in, on, under, over, of and, but, or NP ____ VP "the girl is swimming" ____ NP (this is called a Prepositional Phrase) "in the room" N or V or Adj. ____ N or V or Adj. "apples and oranges"

Subcategorization defines the restrictions on which syntactic categories (parts of speech) can or cannot occur within a lexical item. These additional specifications of words are included in our mental lexicon. Verbs are the most common categories that are subcategorized. Verbs can either be transitive or intransitive. Transitive verbs take a direct object, while intransitive verbs take an indirect object (usually they need a preposition before the noun).

Transitive verb: to eat Intransitive: to sleep

I ate an apple. (direct object) I was sleeping in the bed. (indirect object)

Individual nouns can also be subcategorized. For example, the noun idea can be followed by a Prepositional Phrase or that and a sentence. But the noun compassion can only be followed by a Prepositional Phrase and not a sentence. (Ungrammatical sentences are marked with asterisks.) the idea of stricter laws the idea that stricter laws are necessary his compassion for the animals *his compassion that the animals are hurt

Phrase structure rules describe how phrases are formed and in what order. These rules define the following: Noun Phrase (NP) Verb Phrase (VP) Prepositional Phrase (PP) Sentence (S) (Det.) (Adj.) Noun (PP) Verb (NP) (PP) Prep. NP NP VP

The parentheses indicate the categories are optional. Verbs don't always have to be followed by prepositional phrases and nouns don't always have to be preceded by adjectives. Passive Sentences The difference between the two sentences "Mary hired Bill" and "Bill was hired by Mary" is that the first is active and the second is passive. In order to change an active sentence into a passive one, the object of the active must become the subject of the passive. The verb in the passive sentence becomes a form of "be" plus the participle form of the main verb. And the subject of the active becomes the object of the passive preceded by the word "by." Active Mary hired Bill. Subject + Verb + Object Passive Bill was hired by Mary. Object + "be" + Verb + by + Subject

Part Three: Phonetics and Phonology There are three types of the study of the sounds of language. Acoustic Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds. Auditory Phonetics is the study of the way listeners perceive sounds. Articulatory Phonetics (the type this lesson is concerned with) is the study of how the vocal tracts produce the sounds. The orthography (spelling) of words in misleading, especially in English. One sound can be represented by several different combinations of letters. For example, all of the following words contain the same vowel sound: he, believe, Lee, Caesar, key, amoeba, loudly, machine, people, and sea. The following poem illustrates this fact of English humorously (note the pronunciation of the bold words): I take it you already know of tough and bough and cough and dough? Some may stumble, but not you, on hiccough, thorough, slough, and through? So now you are ready, perhaps, to learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word, that looks like beard, but sounds like bird. And dead, it's said like bed, not bead; for goodness' sake, don't call it deed! Watch out for meat and great and threat. (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.) A moth is not a moth in mother, nor both in bother, broth in brother. And here is not a match for there, nor dear and fear, for bear and pear. And then there's dose and rose and lose - just look them up - and goose and choose And cork and work and card and ward and font and front and word and sword And do and go, then thwart and cart, come, come! I've hardly made a start. A dreadful language? Why man alive! I've learned to talk it when I was five. And yet to write it, the more I tried, I hadn't learned it at fifty-five. - Author Unknown The discrepancy between spelling and sounds led to the formation of the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA.) The symbols used in this alphabet can be used to represent all sounds of all human languages. The following is the English Phonetic alphabet. You might want to memorize all of these symbols, as most foreign language dictionaries use the IPA. Phonetic Alphabet for English Pronunciation p b pill bill d dill n neal s seal z zeal chill Jill which k kill g gill ring h heal l r j leaf reef you aj j a but light boy bit bet foot awe bar sofa

m mill f v t feel veal thigh thy shill azure till

w witch i e beet bait

u boot o boat bat

aw cow

Some speakers of English pronounce the words which and witch differently, but if you pronounce both words identically, just use w for both words. And the sounds // and // are pronounced the same, but the former is used in stressed syllables, while the latter is used in unstressed syllables. This list does not even begin to include all of the phonetic symbols though. One other symbol is the glottal stop, which is somewhat rare in English. Some linguists in the United States traditionally use different symbols than the IPA symbols. These are listed below. U.S. IPA t

The production of any speech sound involves the movement of air. Air is pushed through the lungs, larynx (vocal folds) and vocal tract (the oral and nasal cavities.) Sounds produced by using air from the lungs are called pulmonic sounds. If the air is pushed out, it is called egressive. If the air is sucked in, it is called ingressive. Sounds produced by ingressive airstreams are ejectives, implosives, and clicks. These sounds are common among African and American Indian languages. The majority of languages in the world use pulmonic egressive airstream mechanisms, and I will present only these types of sounds in this lesson. Consonants Consonants are produced as air from the lungs is pushed through the glottis (the opening between the vocal cords) and out the mouth. They are classified according to voicing, aspiration, nasal/oral sounds, places of articulation and manners of articulation. Voicing is whether the vocal folds vibrate or not. The sound /s/ is called voiceless because there is no vibration, and the sound /z/ is called voiced because the vocal folds do vibrate (you can feel on your neck if there is vibration.) Only three sounds in English have aspiration, the sounds /b/, /p/ and /t/. An extra puff of air is pushed out when these sounds begin a word or stressed syllable. Hold a piece of paper close to your mouth when saying the words pin and spin. You should notice extra air when you say pin. Aspiration is indicated in writing with a superscript h, as in /p/. Nasal sounds are produced when the velum (the soft palate located in the back of the roof of the mouth) is lowered and air is passed through the nose and mouth. Oral sounds are produced when the velum is raised and air passes only through the mouth. Places of Articulation Bilabial: lips together Labiodental: lower lip against front teeth Interdental: tongue between teeth Alveolar: tongue near alveolar ridge on roof of mouth (in between teeth and hard palate) Palatal: tongue on hard palate Velar: tongue near velum Glottal: space between vocal folds The following sound is not found in the English language, although it is common in languages such as French and Arabic: Uvular: raise back of tongue to uvula (the appendage hanging down from the velum) Manners of Articulation Stop: obstruct airstream completely Fricative: partial obstruction with friction Affricate: stop airstream, then release Liquids: partial obstruction, no friction Glides: little or no obstruction, must occur with a vowel You should practice saying the sounds of the English alphabet to see if you can identify the places of articulation in the mouth. The sounds are described by voicing, place and then manner of articulation, so the sound /j/ would be called a voiced palatal glide and the sound /s/ would be called a voiceless alveolar fricative. Bilabial Labiodental Interdental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal

Stop (oral) Nasal (stop) Fricative Affricate Glide Liquid

p b m f v

t d n s z

k g h

w lr

For rows that have two consonants, the top consonant is voiceless and the bottom consonant is voiced. Nasal stops are all voiced, as are liquids. The sound /j/ is also voiced. If sounds are in two places on the chart, that means they can be pronounced either way. Vowels Vowels are produced by a continuous airstream and all are voiced. They are classified according to height of the tongue, part of tongue involved, and position of the lips. The tongue can be high, mid, or low; and the part of the tongue used can be front, central or back. Only four vowels are produced with rounded lips and only four vowels are considered tense instead of lax. The sound /a/ would be written as a low back lax unrounded vowel. Many languages also have vowels called diphthongs, a sequence of two sounds, vowel + glide. Examples in English include oy in boy and ow in cow. In addition, vowels can be nasalized when they occur before nasal consonants. A diacritic mark [~] is placed over the vowel to show this. The vowel sounds in bee and bean are considered different because the sound in bean is nasalized. Part of Tongue Front Central Back High Tongue Height Mid Low i e u

The bold vowels are tense, and the italic vowels are rounded. English also includes the diphthongs: [aj] as in bite, [aw] as in cow, and [oj] as in boy. For the complete IPA chart with symbols for the sounds of every human language, please visit the International Phonetic Association's website. And you're looking for a way to type English IPA symbols online, please visit ipa.typeit.org Major Classes of Sounds (Distinctive Features) All of the classes of sounds described above can be put into more general classes that include the patterning of sounds in the world's languages. Continuant sounds indicate a continuous airflow, while non-continuant sounds indicate total obstruction of the airstream. Obstruent sounds do not allow air to escape through the nose, while

sonorant sounds have a relatively free airflow through the mouth or nose. The following table summarizes this information: Obstruent fricatives Sonorant liquids, glides, vowels

Continuant

Non-Continuant oral stops, affricates nasal stops

Major Class Features [+ Consonantal] consonants [- Consonantal] vowels [+Sonorant] nasals, liquids, glides, vowels [- Sonorant] stops, fricatives, affricates (obstruents) [+ Approximant] glides [j, w] [- Approximant] everything else Voice Features [+ Voice] voiced [- Voice] voiceless [+ Spread Glottis] aspirated [p, t, k] [- Spread Glottis] unaspirated [+ Constricted Glottis] ejectives, implosives [- Constricted Glottis] everything else Manner Features [+ Continuant] fricatives [f, v, s, z, , , , ] [- Continuant] stops [p, b, t, d, k, g, ] [+ Nasal] nasal consonants [m, n, ] [- Nasal] all oral consonants [+ Lateral] [l] [- Lateral] [r] [+ Delayed Release] affricates [, ] [- Delayed Release] stops [p, b, t, d, k, g, ] [+ Strident] noisy fricatives [f, v, s, z, , ] [- Strident] [?, , h] Place Features [Labial] involves lips [f, v, p, b, w]

[Coronal] alveolar ridge to palate [, , s, z, t, d, , , n, r, l] [+ Anterior] interdentals and true alveolars [- Anterior] retroflex and palatals [, , , , j] [Dorsal] from velum back [k, g, ] [Glottal] in larynx [h, ] Vowels Height [ high] [ low] Backness [ back] Lip Rounding [ round] Tenseness [ tense] Whereas phonetics is the study of sounds and is concerned with the production, audition and perception of of speech sounds (called phones), phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language and operates at the level of sound systems and abstract sound units. Knowing the sounds of a language is only a small part of phonology. This importance is shown by the fact that you can change one word into another by simply changing one sound. Consider the differences between the words time and dime. The words are identical except for the first sound. [t] and [d] can therefore distinguish words, and are called contrasting sounds. They are distinctive sounds in English, and all distinctive sounds are classified as phonemes. Minimal Pairs Minimal pairs are words with different meanings that have the same sounds except for one. These contrasting sounds can either be consonants or vowels. The words pin and bin are minimal pairs because they are exactly the same except for the first sound. The words read and rude are also exactly the same except for the vowel sound. The examples from above, time and dime, are also minimal pairs. In effect, words with one contrastive sound are minimal pairs. Another feature of minimal pairs is overlapping distribution. Sounds that occur in phonetic environments that are identical are said to be in overlapping distribution. The sounds of [n] from pin and bin are in overlapping distribution because they occur in both words. The same is true for three and through. The sounds of [r] is in overlapping distribution because they occur in both words as well. Free Variation Some words in English are pronounced differently by different speakers. This is most noticeable among American English speakers and British English speakers, as well as dialectal differences. This is evidenced in the ways neither, for example, can be pronounced. American English pronunciation is [nir], while British English pronunciation is [najr]. Phones and Allophones Phonemes are not physical sounds. They are abstract mental representations of the phonological units of a language. Phones are considered to be any single speech sound of which phonemes are made. Phonemes are a family of phones regarded as a single sound and represented by the same symbol. The different phones that are the realization of a phoneme are called allophones of that phoneme. The use of allophones is not random, but rule-governed. No one is taught these rules as they are learned subconsciously when the native language is acquired. To distinguish between a phoneme and its allophones, I will use slashes // to enclose phonemes and brackets [] to enclose allophones or phones. For example, [i] and [ ] are allophones of the phoneme /i/ [] and [] are allophones of the phoneme //.

Complementary Distribution If two sounds are allophones of the same phoneme, they are said to be in complementary distribution. These sounds cannot occur in minimal pairs and they cannot change the meaning of otherwise identical words. If you interchange the sounds, you will only change the pronunciation of the words, not the meaning. Native speakers of the language regard the two allophones as variations of the same sound. To hear this, start to say the word cool (your lips should be pursed in anticipation of /u/ sound), but then say kill instead (with your lips still pursed.) Your pronunciation of kill should sound strange because cool and kill are pronounced with different allophones of the phoneme /k/. Nasalized vowels are allophones of the same phoneme in English. Take, for example, the sounds in bad and ban. The phoneme is / /, however the allophones are [ ] and [ ]. et in French, nasalized vowels are not allophones of the same phonemes. They are separate phonemes. The words beau [bo] and bon [b ] are not in complementary distribution because they are minimal pairs and have contrasting sounds. Changing the sounds changes the meaning of the words. This is just one example of differences between languages. Phonological Rules Assimilation: sounds become more like neighboring sounds, allowing for ease of articulation or pronunciation; such as vowels are nasalized before nasal consonants - Harmony: non-adjacent vowels become more similar by sharing a feature or set of features (common in Finnish) - Gemination: sound becomes identical to an adjacent sound - Regressive Assimilation: sound on left is the target, and sound on right is the trigger Dissimilation: sounds become less like neighboring sounds; these rules are quite rare, but one example in English is [ff] becoming [fft] (/f/ and // are both fricatives, but /t/ is a stop) Epenthesis: insertion of a sound, e.g. Latin "homre" became Spanish "hombre" - Prothesis: insertion of vowel sound at beginning of word - Anaptyxis: vowel sound with predictable quality is inserted word-internally - Paragoge: insertion of vowel sound at end of word - Excrescence: consonant sound inserted between other consonants (also called stop-intrusion) Deletion: deletion of a sound; e.g. French word-final consonants are deleted when the next word begins with a consonant (but are retained when the following word begins with a vowel) - Aphaeresis: vowel sound deleted at beginning of word - Syncope: vowel sound is deleted word-internally - Apocope: vowel sound deleted at end of word Metathesis: reordering of phonemes; in some dialects of English, the word asked is pronounced [ks]; children's speech shows many cases of metathesis such as aminal for animal Lenition: consonant changes to a weaker manner of articulation; voiced stop becomes a fricative, fricative becomes a glide, etc. Palatalization: sound becomes palatal when adjacent to a front vowel Compensatory Lengthening: sound becomes long as a result of sound loss, e.g. Latin "octo" became Italian "otto" Assimilation in English An interesting observation of assimilation rules is evidenced in the formation of plurals and the past tense in English. When pluralizing nouns, the last letter is pronounced as either [s], [z], or [z]. When forming past tenses of verbs,

the -ed ending is pronounced as either [t], [d], [d]. If you were to sort words into three columns, you would be able to tell why certain words are followed by certain sounds: Plural nouns /z/ /z/ dads bibs dogs churches kisses judges Hopefully, you can determine which consonants produce which sounds. In the nouns, /s/ is added after voiceless consonants, and /z/ is added after voiced consonants. /z/ is added after sibilants. For the verbs, /t/ is added after voiceless consonants, and /d/ is added after voiced consonants. /d/ is added after alveolar stops. The great thing about this is that no one ever taught you this in school. But thanks to linguistics, you now know why there are different sounds (because of assimiliation rules, the consonants become more like their neighboring consonants.)

/s/ cats tips

laughs

/t/ kissed

Past Tense /d/ /d/ loved patted

washed jogged waded coughed teased seeded Writing Rules A general phonological rule is A B / D __ E (said: A becomes B when it occurs between D and E) Other symbols in rule writing include: C = any obstruent, V = any vowel, = nothing, # = word boundary, ( ) = optional, and { } = either/or. A deletion rule is A / E __ (A is deleted when it occurs after E) and an insertion rule is A / E __ (A is inserted when it occurs after E). Alpha notation is used to collapse similar assimilation rules into one. C [ voice] / __ [ voice] (An obstruent becomes voiced when it occurs before a voiced obstruent AND an obstruent becomes voiceless when it occurs before a voiceless obstruent.) Similarly, it can be used for dissimilation rules too. C [- voice] / __ [ voice] (An obstruent becomes voiced when it occurs before a voiceless obstruent AND an obstruent becomes voiceless when it occurs before a voiced obstruent.) Gemination rules are written as C1C2 C2C2 (for example, pd dd) Syllable Structure There are three peaks to a syllable: nucleus (vowel), onset (consonant before nucleus) and coda (consonant after nucleus.) The onset and coda are both optional, meaning that a syllable could contain a vowel and nothing else. The nucleus is required in every syllable by definition. The order of the peaks is always onset - nucleus - coda. All languages permit open syllables (Consonant + Vowel), but not all languages allow closed syllables (Consonant + Vowel + Consonant). Languages that only allow open syllables are called CV languages. In addition to not allowing codas, some CV languages also have constraints on the number of consonants allowed in the onset. The sonority profile dictates that sonority must rise to the nucleus and fall to the coda in every language. The sonority scale (from most to least sonorous) is vowels - glides - liquids - nasals - obstruents. Sonority must rise in the onset, but the sounds cannot be adjacent to or share a place of articulation (except [s] in English) nor can there be more than two consonants in the onset. This explains why English allows some consonant combinations, but not others. For example, price [prajs] is a well-formed syllable and word because the sonority rises in the onset (p, an obstruent, is less sonorous than r, a liquid); however, rpice [rpajs] is not a syllable in English because the sonority does not rise in the onset. The Maximality Condition states that onsets are as large as possible up to the well-formedness rules of a language. Onsets are always preferred over codas when syllabifying words. There are also constraints that state the maximum number of consonants between two vowels is four; onsets and codas have two consonants maximally; and onsets and codas can be bigger only at the edges of words.

Part Four: Semantics and Pragmatics Semantics Lexical semantics is concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning of relationships among words, while phrasal semantics is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word. Pragmatics is the study of how context affects meaning, such as how sentences are interpreted in certain situations. Semantic properties are the components of meanings of words. For example, the semantic property "human" can be found in many words such as parent, doctor, baby, professor, widow, and aunt. Other semantic properties include animate objects, male, female, countable items and non-countable items. The -nyms Homonyms: different words that are pronounced the same, but may or may not be spelled the same (to, two, and too) Polysemous: word that has multiple meanings that are related conceptually or historically (bear can mean to tolerate or to carry or to support) Homograph: different words that are spelled identically and possibly pronounced the same; if they are pronounced the same, they are also homonyms (pen can mean writing utensil or cage) Heteronym: homographs that are pronounced differently (dove the bird and dove the past tense of dive) Synonym: words that mean the same but sound different (couch and sofa) Antonym: words that are opposite in meaning Complementary pairs: alive and dead Gradable pairs: big and small (no absolute scale) Hyponym: set of related words (red, white, yellow, blue are all hyponyms of "color") Metonym: word used in place of another to convey the same meaning (jock used for athlete, Washington used for American government, crown used for monarcy) Retronym: expressions that are no longer redundant (silent movie used to be redundant because a long time ago, all movies were silent, but this is no longer true or redundant) Thematic Roles Thematic roles are the semantic relationships between the verbs and noun phrases of sentences. The following chart shows the thematic roles in relationship to verbs of sentences: Thematic Role Agent Theme Location Goal Description the one who performs an action the place where an action takes place the place to which an action is directed Maria ran It rains in Spain Put the cat on the porch Example

the person or thing that undergoes an action Mary called John

Source Instrument Experiencer Causative Possessor Recipient

the place from which an action originates one who perceives something a natural force that causes a change one who has something one who receives something

He flew from Chicago to LA She heard Bob play the piano The wind destroyed the house The tail of the cat got caught I gave it to the girl

the means by which an action is performed He cuts his hair with scissors

Sentential Meaning The meaning of sentences is built from the meaning of noun phrases and verbs. Sentences contain truth conditions if the circumstances in the sentence are true. Paraphrases are two sentences with the same truth conditions, despite subtle differences in structure and emphasis. The ball was kicked by the boy is a paraphrase of the sentence the boy kicked the ball, but they have the same truth conditions - that a boy kicked a ball. Sometimes the truth of one sentence entails or implies the truth of another sentence. This is called entailment and the opposite of this is called contradiction, where one sentence implies the falseness of another. He was assassinated entails that he is dead. He was assassinated contradicts with the statement he is alive. Pragmatics Pragmatics is the interpretation of linguistic meaning in context. Linguistic context is discourse that precedes a sentence to be interpreted and situational context is knowledge about the world. In the following sentences, the kids have eaten already and surprisingly, they are hungry, the linguistic context helps to interpret the second sentence depending on what the first sentence says. The situational context helps to interpret the second sentence because it is common knowledge that humans are not usually hungry after eating. Maxims of Conversation Grice's maxims for conversation are conventions of speech such as the maxim of quantity that states a speaker should be as informative as is required and neither more nor less. The maxim of relevance essentially states a speaker should stay on the topic, and the maxim of manner states the speaker should be brief and orderly, and avoid ambiguity. The fourth maxim, the maxim of quality, states that a speaker should not lie or make any unsupported claims. Performative Sentences In these types of sentences, the speaker is the subject who, by uttering the sentence, is accomplishing some additional action, such as daring, resigning, or nominating. These sentences are all affirmative, declarative and in the present tense. An informal test to see whether a sentence is performative or not is to insert the words I hereby before the verb. I hereby challenge you to a match or I hereby fine you $500 are both performative, but I hereby know that girl is not. Other performative verbs are bet, promise, pronounce, bequeath, swear, testify, and dismiss. Presuppositions These are implicit assumptions required to make a sentence meaningful. Sentences that contain presuppositions are not allowed in court because accepting the validity of the statement mean accepting the presuppositions as well. Have you stopped stealing cars? is not admissible in court because no matter how the defendant answers, the presupposition that he steals cars already will be acknowledged. Have you stopped smoking? implies that you smoke already, and Would you like another piece? implies that you've already had one piece. Deixis Deixis is reference to a person, object, or event which relies on the situational context. First and second person pronouns such as my, mine, you, your, yours, we, ours and us are always deictic because their reference is entirely

dependent on context. Demonstrative articles like this, that, these and those and expressions of time and place are always deictic as well. In order to understand what specific times or places such expressions refer to, we also need to know when or where the utterance was said. If someone says "I'm over here!" you would need to know who "I" referred to, as well as where "here" is. Deixis marks one of the boundaries of semantics and pragmatics.

Part Five: Neurolinguistics The human brain consists of 10 billion nerve cells (neurons) and billions of fibers that connect them. These neurons or gray matter form the cortex, the surface of the brain, and the connecting fibers or white matter form the interior of the brain. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and right cerebral hemispheres. These hemispheres are connected by the corpus callosum. In general, the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa.

The auditory cortex receives and interprets auditory stimuli, while the visual cortex receives and interprets visual stimuli. The angular gyrus converts the auditory stimuli to visual stimuli and vice versa. The motor cortex signals the muscles to move when we want to talk and is directed by Broca's area. The nerve fiber connecting Wernicke's and Broca's area is called the arcuate fasciculus. Lateralization refers to any cognitive functions that are localized to one side of the brain or the other. Language is said to be lateralized and processed in the left hemisphere of the brain. Paul Broca first related language to the left side of the brain when he noted that damage to the front part of the left hemisphere (now called Broca's area) resulted in a loss of speech, while damage to the right side did not. He determined this through autopsies of patients who had acquired language deficits following brain injuries. A language disorder that follows a brain lesion is called aphasia, and patients with damage to Broca's area have slow and labored speech, loss of function words, and poor word order, yet good comprehension. Carl Wernicke also used studies of autopsies to describe another type of aphasia that resulted from lesions in the back portion of the left hemisphere (now called Wernicke's area.) Unlike Broca's patients, Wernicke's spoke

fluently and with good pronunciation, but with many lexical errors and a difficulty in comprehension. Broca's and Wernicke's area are the two main regions of the cortex of the brain related to language processing. Aphasics can suffer from anomia, jargon aphasia, and acquired dyslexia. Anomia is commonly referred to as "tip of the tongue" phenomenon and many aphasics experience word finding difficulty on a regular basis. Jargon aphasia results in the substitution of one word or sound for another. Some aphasics may substitute similar words for each other, such as table for chair, or they may substitute completely unrelated words, such as chair for engine. Others may pronounce table as sable, substituting an s sound for a t sound. Aphasics who became dyslexic after brain damage are called acquired dyslexics. When reading aloud words printed on cards, the patients produced the following substitutions: Stimuli Response One Response Two Act South Heal Play East Pain Play West Medicine

The substitution of phonologically similar words, such as pool and tool, also provides evidence that a human's mental lexicon is organized by both phonology and semantics. Broca's aphasics and some acquired dyslexics are unable to read function words, and when presented with them on the cards, the patients say no, as shown in the following example: Stimuli One Response Stimuli Two Response Witch Hour Wood Witch Time Wood Which Our Would no! no! no!

The patient's errors suggest our mental dictionary is further organized into parts consisting of major content words (first stimuli) and grammatical words (second stimuli.) In addition, split-brain patients (those who have had their corpus callosum severed) provide evidence for language lateralization. If an object is placed in the left hand of split-brain patient whose vision is cut off, the person cannot name the object, but will know how to use it. The information is sent to the right side of the brain, but cannot be relayed to the left side for linguistic naming. However, if the object is placed in the person's right hand, the person can immediately name it because the information is sent directly to the left hemisphere. Dichotic listening is another experimental technique, using auditory signals. Subjects hear a different sound in each ear, such as boy in the left ear and girl in the right ear or water rushing in the left ear and a horn honking in the right ear. When asked to state what they heard in each ear, subjects are more frequently correct in reporting linguistic stimuli in the right ear (girl) and nonverbal stimuli in the left ear (water rushing.) This is because the left side of the brain is specialized for language and a word heard in the right ear will transfer directly to the left side of the body because of the contralateralization of the brain. Furthermore, the right side of the brain is specialized for nonverbal stimuli, such as music and environmental sounds, and a noise heard in the left ear will transfer directly to the right side of the brain.

Part Six: Child Language Acquisition and Second Language Acquisition Linguistic competence develops in stages, from babbling to one word to two word, then telegraphic speech. Babbling is now considered the earliest form of language acquisition because infants will produce sounds based on what language input they receive. One word sentences (holophrastic speech) are generally monosyllabic in consonant-vowel clusters. During two word stage, there are no syntactic or morphological markers, no inflections for plural or past tense, and pronouns are rare, but the intonation contour extends over the whole utterance. Telegraphic speech lacks function words and only carries the open class content words, so that the sentences sound like a telegram. Three theories The three theories of language acquisition: imitation, reinforcement and analogy, do not explain very well how children acquire language. Imitation does not work because children produce sentences never heard before, such as "cat stand up table." Even when they try to imitate adult speech, children cannot generate the same sentences because of their limited grammar. And children who are unable to speak still learn and understand the language, so that when they overcome their speech impairment they immediately begin speaking the language. Reinforcement also does not work because it actually seldomly occurs and when it does, the reinforcement is correcting pronunciation or truthfulness, and not grammar. A sentence such as "apples are purple" would be corrected more often because it is not true, as compared to a sentence such as "apples is red" regardless of the grammar. Analogy also cannot explain language acquisition. Analogy involves the formation of sentences or phrases by using other sentences as samples. If a child hears the sentence, "I painted a red barn," he can say, by analogy, "I painted a blue barn." Yet if he hears the sentence, "I painted a barn red," he cannot say "I saw a barn red." The analogy did not work this time, and this is not a sentence of English. Acquisitions Phonology: A child's error in pronunciation is not random, but rule-governed. Typical phonological rules include: consonant cluster simplification (spoon becomes poon), devoicing of final consonants (dog becomes dok), voicing of initial consonants (truck becomes druck), and consonant harmony (doggy becomes goggy, or big becomes gig.) Morphology: An overgeneralization of constructed rules is shown when children treat irregular verbs and nouns as regular. Instead of went as the past tense of go, children use goed because the regular verbs add an -ed ending to form the past tense. Similarly, children use gooses as the plural of goose instead of geese, because regular nouns add an -s in the plural. The "Innateness Hypothesis" of child language acquisition, proposed by Noam Chomsky, states that the human species is prewired to acquire language, and that the kind of language is also determined. Many factors have led to this hypothesis such as the ease and rapidity of language acquisition despite impoverished input as well as the uniformity of languages. All children will learn a language, and children will also learn more than one language if they are exposed to it. Children follow the same general stages when learning a language, although the linguistic input is widely varied. The poverty of the stimulus states that children seem to learn or know the aspects of grammar for which they receive no information. In addition, children do not produce sentences that could not be sentences in some human language. The principles of Universal Grammar underlie the specific grammars of all languages and determine the class of languages that can be acquired unconsciously without instruction. It is the genetically determined faculty of the left hemisphere, and there is little doubt that the brain is specially equipped for acquisition of human language. The "Critical Age Hypothesis" suggests that there is a critical age for language acquisition without the need for special teaching or learning. During this critical period, language learning proceeds quickly and easily. After this

period, the acquisition of grammar is difficult, and for some people, never fully achieved. Cases of children reared in social isolation have been used for testing the critical age hypothesis. None of the children who had little human contact were able to speak any language once reintroduced into society. Even the children who received linguistic input after being reintroduced to society were unable to fully develop language skills. These cases of isolated children, and of deaf children, show that humans cannot fully acquire any language to which they are exposed unless they are within the critical age. Beyond this age, humans are unable to acquire much of syntax and inflectional morphology. At least for humans, this critical age does not pertain to all of language, but to specific parts of the grammar. Second Language Acquisition Teaching Methods Grammar-translation: the student memorizes words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from native to target language and vice versa; most commonly used method in schools because it does not require teacher to be fluent; however, least effective method of teaching Direct method: the native language is not used at all in the classroom, and the student must learn the new language without formal instruction; based on theories of first language acquisition Audio-lingual: heavy use of dialogs and audio, based on the assumption that language learning is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement; influenced by psychology Natural Approach: emphasis on vocabulary and not grammar; focus on meaning, not form; use of authentic materials instead of textbook Silent Way: teachers remain passive observers while students learn, which is a process of personal growth; no grammatical explanation or modeling by the teacher Total Physical Response: students play active role as listener and performer, must respond to imperative drills with physical action Suggestopedia: students always remain comfortable and relaxed and learn through memorization of meaningful texts, although the goal is understanding Community Language Learning: materials are developed as course progresses and teacher understands what students need and want to learn; learning involves the whole person and language is seen as more than just communication Community Language Teaching: incorporates all components of language and helps students with various learning styles; use of communication-based activities with authentic materials, needs of learner are taken into consideration when planning topics and objectives Four skill areas The four skill areas of learning a foreign language need to be addressed consistently and continually. Good lesson plans incorporate all four: Listening, Speaking, Reading (and Vocabulary), and Writing (and Grammar). Native speakers do not learn the skill areas separately, nor do they use them separately, so they shouldnt be taught separately. However, it is easy to fall into the trap of teaching about the language, instead of actually teaching the language. Most textbooks resort to teaching grammar and vocabulary lists and nothing more.

Part Seven: Sociolinguistics A dialect is a variety of language that is systematically different from other varieties of the same language. The dialects of a single language are mutually intelligible, but when the speakers can no longer understand each other, the dialects become languages. Geographical regions are also considered when dialects become languages. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are all considered separate languages because of regular differences in grammar and the countries in which they are spoken, yet Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes can all understand one another. Hindi and Urdu are considered mutually intelligible languages when spoken, yet the writing systems are different. On the other

hand, Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible languages when spoken, yet the writing systems are the same. A dialect is considered standard if it is used by the upper class, political leaders, in literature and is taught in schools as the correct form of the language. Overt prestige refers to this dominant dialect. A non-standard dialect is associated with covert prestige and is an ethnic or regional dialect of a language. These non-standard dialects are just as linguistically sophisticated as the standard dialect, and judgments to the inferiority of them are based on social or racist judgments. African-American English contains many regular differences of the standard dialect. These differences are the same as the differences among many of the world's dialects. Phonological differences include r and l deletion of words like poor (pa) and all (awe.) Consonant cluster simplification also occurs (passed pronounced like pass), as well as a loss of interdental fricatives. Syntactic differences include the double negative and the loss of and habitual use of the verb "be." He late means he is late now, but he be late means he is always late. A lingua franca is a major language used in an area where speakers of more than one language live that permits communication and commerce among them. English is called the lingua franca of the whole world, while French used to be the lingua franca of diplomacy. A pidgin is a rudimentary language of few lexical items and less complex grammatical rules based on another language. No one learns a pidgin as a native language, but children do learn creoles as a first language. Creoles are defined as pidgins that are adopted by a community as its native tongue. Besides dialects, speakers may use different styles or registers (such as contractions) depending on the context. Slang may also be used in speech, but is not often used in formal situations or writing. Jargon refers to the unique vocabulary pertaining to a certain area, such as computers or medicine. Words or expressions referring to certain acts that are forbidden or frowned upon are considered taboo. These taboo words produce euphemisms, words or phrases that replace the expressions that are being avoided. The use of words may indicate a society's attitude toward sex, bodily functions or religious beliefs, and they may also reflect racism or sexism in a society. Language itself is not racist or sexist, but the society may be. Such insulting words may reinforce biased views, and changes in society may be reflected in the changes in language.

Part Eight: Historical Linguistics Languages that evolve from a common source are genetically related. These languages were once dialects of the same language. Earlier forms of Germanic languages, such as German, English, and Swedish were dialects of ProtoGermanic, while earlier forms of Romance languages, such as Spanish, French, and Italian were dialects of Latin. Furthermore, earlier forms of Proto-Germanic and Latin were once dialects of Indo-European. Linguistic changes like sound shift is found in the history of all languages, as evidenced by the regular sound correspondences that exist between different stages of the same language, different dialects, and different languages. Words, morphemes, and phonemes may be altered, added or lost. The meaning of words may broaden, narrow or shift. New words may be introduced into a language by borrowing, or by coinage, blends and acronyms. The lexicon may also shrink as older words become obsolete.

Change comes about as a result of the restructuring of grammar by children learning the language. Grammars seem to become simple and regular, but these simplifications may be compensated for by more complexities. Sound changes can occur because of assimilation, a process of ease of articulation. Some grammatical changes are analogic changes, generalizations that lead to more regularity, such as sweeped instead of swept. The study of linguistic change is called historical and comparative linguistics. Linguists identify regular sound correspondences using the comparative method among the cognates (words that developed from the same ancestral language) of related languages. They can restructure an earlier protolanguage and this allows linguists to determine the history of a language family. Old English, Middle English, Modern English Old English 499-1066 CE Beowulf Shakespeare

Middle English 1066-1500 CE Canterbury Tales Modern English 1500-present

Phonological change: Between 1400 and 1600 CE, the Great Vowel Shift took place. The seven long vowels of Middle English underwent changes. The high vowels [i] and [u] became the diphthongs [aj] and [aw]. The long vowels increased tongue height and shifted upward, and [a] was fronted. Many of the spelling inconsistencies of English are because of the Great Vowel Shift. Our spelling system still reflects the way words were pronounced before the shift took place. Morphological change: Many Indo-European languages had extensive case endings that governed word order, but these are no longer found in Romance languages or English. Although pronouns still show a trace of the case system (he vs. him), English uses prepositions to show the case. Instead of the dative case (indirect objects), English usually the words to or for. Instead of the genitive case, English uses the word of or 's after a noun to show possession. Other cases include the nominative (subject pronouns), accusative (direct objects), and vocative. Syntactic change: Because of the lack of the case system, word order has become more rigid and strict in Modern English. Now it is strictly Subject - Verb - Object order. Orthographic change: Consonant clusters have become simplified, such as hlaf becoming loaf and hnecca becoming neck. However, some of these clusters are still written, but are no longer pronounced, such as gnaw, write, and dumb. Lexical change: Old English borrowed place names from Celtic, army, religious and educational words from Latin, and everyday words from Scandinavian. Angle and Saxon (German dialects) form the basis of Old English phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. Middle English borrowed many words from French in the areas of government, law, religion, literature and education because of the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE. Modern English borrowed words from Latin and Greek because of the influence of the classics, with much scientific terminology. For more information, read the History of English page.

Part Nine: Classification of Languages Indo-European family of languages

Italic (Latin) o Romance Catalan French Italian Occitan (Provenal) Portuguese Rhaeto-Romansch Romanian Spanish Germanic o North Germanic Danish Faroese Icelandic Norwegian Swedish o East Germanic Gothic (extinct) o West Germanic Afrikaans Dutch English Flemish Frisian German Yiddish Slavic o Western Czech Polish Slovak Sorbian o Eastern Belarusian Russian Ukrainian o Southern Bulgarian Croatian Macedonian Old Church Slavonic Serbian Slovene Baltic o Latvian o Lithuanian o Old Prussian (extinct) Celtic

Brythonic Breton Cornish (extinct) Gaulish (extinct) Welsh o Goidelic Irish Manx Gaelic (extinct) Scots Gaelic Hellenic (Greek) Albanian Armenian Anatolian (extinct) Tocharian (extinct) Indo-Iranian o Indo-Aryan (Indic) Assamese Bengali Bihari Gujarati Hindi-Urdu Marathi Punjabi Romani Sanskrit Sindhi Singhalese o Iranian Avestan Balochi Farsi (Persian) Kurdish Pashtu (Afghan) Sogdian

Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) is the other major family of languages spoken on the European continent. Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are examples. Afro-Asiatic languages are spoken in Northern Africa and the Middle East. They include Berber, Egyptian, Omotic and Cushitic languages (Somali, Iraqw) as well as the modern Semitic languages of Hebrew, Arabic and Amharic, in addition to languages spoken in biblical times, such as Aramaic, Akkadian, Babylonian, Canaanite, and Phoenician. The Altaic languages are classified as Japanese and Korean, though some linguists separate these languages into their own groups. Sino-Tibetan languages include Mandarin, Hakka, Wu, Burmese, Tibetan, and all of the Chinese "dialects." Austro-tai languages include Indonesian, Javanese and Thai; while the Asiatic group includes Vietnamese.

The Dravidian languages of Tamil and Telugu are spoken in southeastern India and Sri Lanka. The Caucasian language family consists of 40 different languages, and is divided into Cartvelian (south Caucasian), North-West Caucasian and North-East Caucasian language groups. Some languages are Georgian, Megrelian, Chechen, Ingush Avarian, Lezgian and Dargin. These languages are mostly spoken in Georgia, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Jordan and parts of the Russian federation. The Niger-Congo family includes most of the African languages. About 1,500 languages belong to this group, including the Bantu languages of Swahili, Tswana, Xhosa, Zulu, Kikuyu, and Shona. Other languages are Ewe, Mina, Yoruba, Igbo, Wolof, Kordofanian and Fulfulde. Other African language groups are Nilo-Saharan, which includes 200 languages spoken in Central and Eastern Africa; and Khoisan, the click languages of southern Africa. The Khoisan group only contains about 30 languages, most of which are spoken in Namibia and Botswana. The Austronesian family also contains about 900 languages, spoken all over the globe. Hawaiian, Maori, Tagalog, and Malay are all representatives of this language family. Many languages are, or were, spoken in North and South America by the native peoples before the European conquests. Knowledge of these languages is limited, and because many of the languages are approaching extinction, linguists have little hope of achieving a complete understanding of the Amerindian language families. Phonology (journal). Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. It has traditionally focused largely on study of the systems of phonemes in particular languages, but it may also cover any linguistic analysis either at a level beneath the word (including syllable, onset and rhyme, articulatory gestures, articulatory features, mora, etc.) or at all levels of language where sound is considered to be structured for conveying linguistic meaning. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages. The word phonology (as in the phonology of English) can also refer to the phonological system (sound system) of a given language. This is one of the fundamental systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax and its vocabulary. Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics. While phonetics concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech,[1][2] phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. In other words, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics, and phonology to theoretical linguistics. Note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of phoneme in the mid 20th century. Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception, resulting in specific areas like articulatory phonology or laboratory phonology.

Derivation and definitions

The word phonology comes from Greek , phn, "voice, sound", and the suffix -logy (which is from Greek , lgos, "word, speech, subject of discussion"). Definitions of the term vary. Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Grundzge der Phonologie (1939) defines phonology as "the study of sound pertaining to the system of language", as opposed to phonetics, which is "the study of sound

pertaining to the act of speech" (the distinction between language and speech being basically Saussure's distinction between langue and parole).[3] More recently, Lass (1998) writes that phonology refers broadly to the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language, while in more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function, behaviour and organization of sounds as linguistic items".[1] According to Clark et al. (2007) it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use.[4]

Development of phonology
The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, the Sanskrit grammar composed by Pini in the 4th century BC. In particular the Shiva Sutras, an auxiliary text to the Ashtadhyayi, introduces what can be considered a list of the phonemes of the Sanskrit language, with a notational system for them that is used throughout the main text, which deals with matters of morphology, syntax and semantics. The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (together with his former student Mikoaj Kruszewski) introduced the concept of the phoneme in 1876, and his work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of phonetic alternations (what is now called allophony and morphophonology), and had a significant influence on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. An influential school of phonology in the interwar period was the Prague School. One of its leading members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology),[3] published posthumously in 1939, is among the most important works in the field from this period. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, although this concept had also been recognized by de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague School was Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century. In 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English (SPE), the basis for Generative Phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features. These features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed set, and have the binary values + or . There are at least two levels of representation: underlying representation and surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation (the so called surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore, the Generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural Phonology was a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969 and (more explicitly) in 1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes which interact with one another; which ones are active and which are suppressed are language-specific. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously (though the output of one process may be the input to another). The second-most prominent Natural Phonologist is Stampe's wife, Patricia Donegan; there are many Natural Phonologists in Europe, though also a few others in the U.S., such as Geoffrey Nathan. The principles of Natural Phonology were extended to morphology by Wolfgang U. Dressler, who founded Natural Morphology. In 1976 John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Phonological phenomena are no longer seen as operating on one linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or feature combinations, but rather as involving some parallel sequences of features which reside on multiple tiers. Autosegmental phonology later evolved into

Feature Geometry, which became the standard theory of representation for the theories of the organization of phonology as different as Lexical Phonology and Optimality Theory. Government Phonology, which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their selection of certain binary parameters. That is, all languages' phonological structures are essentially the same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, though parameters may sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures include Jonathan Kaye, Jean Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette, John Harris, and many others. In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky developed Optimality Theory an overall architecture for phonology according to which languages choose a pronunciation of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints which is ordered by importance: a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when the violation is necessary in order to obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince, and has become a dominant trend in phonology. Though this usually goes unacknowledged, Optimality Theory was strongly influenced by Natural Phonology; both view phonology in terms of constraints on speakers and their production, though these constraints are formalized in very different ways.[citation needed] The appeal to phonetic grounding of constraints in various approaches has been criticized by proponents of 'substance-free phonology'.[5] Broadly speaking Government Phonology (or its descendant, Strict-CV Phonology) has a greater following in the United Kingdom, whereas Optimality Theory is predominant in North America.[citation needed]

Analysis of phonemes
An important part of traditional, pre-generative, schools of phonology is studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes. For example, in English, the "p" sound in pot is aspirated (pronounced [p]), while that in spot is not aspirated (pronounced [p]). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations (allophones) of the same phonological category, that is, of the phoneme /p/. (Traditionally, it would be argued that if a word-initial aspirated [p] were interchanged with the unaspirated [p] in spot, native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two sounds are perceived as "the same" /p/.) In some other languages, however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently assigned to different phonemes in those languages. For example, in Thai, Hindi, and Quechua, there are minimal pairs of words for which aspiration is the only contrasting feature (two words with different meanings that are identical except that one has an aspirated sound where the other has an unaspirated one).

The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonemic point of view. Note the intersection of the two circlesthe distinction between short a, i and u is made by both speakers, but Arabic lacks the mid articulation of short vowels, while Hebrew lacks the distinction of vowel length.

The vowels of Modern Standard Arabic and Israeli Hebrew from the phonetic point of view. Note that the two circles are totally separatenone of the vowel-sounds made by speakers of one language is made by speakers of the other. One modern theory is that Israeli Hebrew's phonology reflects Yiddish elements, not Semitic ones. Part of the phonological study of a language therefore involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. The presence or absence of minimal pairs, as mentioned above, is a frequently used criterion for deciding whether two sounds should be assigned to the same phoneme. However other considerations often need to be taken into account as well. The particular sounds which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, [f] and [v] were allophones in English, but these later changed into separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics. The findings and insights of speech perception and articulation research complicates the traditional and somewhat intuitive idea of interchangeable allophones being perceived as the same phoneme. First, interchanged allophones of the same phoneme can result in unrecognizable words. Second, actual speech, even at a word level, is highly coarticulated, so it is problematic to expect to be able to splice words into simple segments without affecting speech perception. Different linguists therefore take different approaches to the problem of assigning sounds to phonemes. For example, they differ in the extent to which they require allophones to be phonetically similar. There are also differing ideas as to whether this grouping of sounds is purely a tool for linguistic analysis, or reflects an actual process in the way the human brain processes a language. Since the early 1960s, theoretical linguists have moved away from the traditional concept of a phoneme, preferring to consider basic units at a more abstract level, as a component of morphemes; these units can be called morphophonemes, and analysis using this approach is called morphophonology.

Other topics in phonology

In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, i.e. replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs), as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation. Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics (the phonological constraints on what sounds can appear in what positions in a given language) and phonological alternation (how the pronunciation of a sound changes through

the application of phonological rules, sometimes in a given order which can be feeding or bleeding,[6]) as well as prosody, the study of suprasegmentals and topics such as stress and intonation. The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. The same principles have been applied to the analysis of sign languages (see Phonemes in sign languages), even though the sub-lexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds
Morphology.

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context (words in a lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology). Morphological typology represents a method for classifying languages according to the ways by which morphemes are used in a language from the analytic that use only isolated morphemes, through the agglutinative ("stuck-together") and fusional languages that use bound morphemes (affixes), up to the polysynthetic, which compress lots of separate morphemes into single words. While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, if not all, words can be related to other words by rules (grammars). For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s", which is only found bound to nouns, and is never separate. Speakers of English (a fusional language) recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher, in one sense. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns, or regularities, in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages. A language like Classical Chinese instead uses unbound ("free") morphemes, but depends on post-phrase affixes, and word order to convey meaning. However, this cannot be said of present-day Mandarin, in which most words are compounds (around 80%), and most roots are bound. In the Chinese languages, these are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. Beyond the agglutinative languages, a polysynthetic language like Chukchi will have words composed of many morphemes: The word "tmeylevtptrkn" is composed of eight morphemes t--mey--levt-pt--rkn, that can be glossed 1.SG.SUBJ-great-head-hurt-PRES.1, meaning 'I have a fierce headache.' The morphology of such languages allows for each consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes, just as the grammars of the language key the usage and understanding of each morpheme. The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is called morphophonology.

Contents

1 History 2 Fundamental concepts o 2.1 Lexemes and word forms 2.1.1 Prosodic word vs. morphological word o 2.2 Inflection vs. word formation

2.3 Paradigms and morphosyntax 2.4 Allomorphy 2.5 Lexical morphology 3 Models o 3.1 Morpheme-based morphology o 3.2 Lexeme-based morphology o 3.3 Word-based morphology 4 Morphological typology 5 References 6 Further reading

o o o

History
The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pini, who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Adhyy by using a constituency grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by Mar al-arw and Amad b. al Masd, date back to at least 1200 CE.[1] The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.[2]

Fundamental concepts
Lexemes and word forms

The distinction between these two senses of "word" is arguably the most important one in morphology. The first sense of "word", the one in which dog and dogs are "the same word", is called a lexeme. The second sense is called word form. We thus say that dog and dogs are different forms of the same lexeme. Dog and dog catcher, on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a lemma, or citation form.
Prosodic word vs. morphological word

Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of 'NOUN-PHRASE1 and NOUN-PHRASE2' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme level of this theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language.[3] In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes instead of by independent "words". The three-word English phrase, "with his club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one word in many languages. Unlike most languages, Kwak'wala semantic affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically, but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwakw'ala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):[4] kwixid-i-da bgwanmai--a q'asa-s-isi t'alwagwayu Morpheme by morpheme translation:

kwixid-i-da = clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER bgwanma--a = man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER q'asa-s-is = otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3SG-POSSESSIVE t'alwagwayu = club. "the man clubbed the otter with his club"

(Notation notes:
1. accusative case marks an entity that something is done to. 2. determiners are words such as "the", "this", "that". 3. the concept of "pivot" is a theoretical construct that is not relevant to this discussion.)

That is, to the speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers -i-da (PIVOT-'the'), referring to man, attaches not to bgwanma ('man'), but instead to the "verb"; the markers --a (ACCUSATIVE-'the'), referring to otter, attach to bgwanma instead of to q'asa ('otter'), etc. To summarize differently: a speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words: kwixid i-da-bgwanma -a-q'asa s-isi-t'alwagwayu clubbed PIVOT-the-mani hit-the-otter with-hisi-club A central publication on this topic is the recent volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2007), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of "word" in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic, possessing the grammatical features of independent words but the prosodic-phonological lack of freedom of bound morphemes. The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory.
Inflection vs. word formation

Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called word formation. The English plural, as illustrated by dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule; compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher provide an example of a word formation rule. Informally, word formation rules form "new words" (that is, new lexemes), while inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). There is a further distinction between two kinds of word formation: derivation and compounding. Compounding is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form; dog catcher is therefore a compound, because both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right before the compounding process has been applied, and are subsequently treated as one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. One example of derivation is clear in this case: the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing it with the derivational prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from the verb depend.

The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear cut. There are many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The next section will attempt to clarify this distinction. Word formation is a process, as we have said, where you combine two complete words, whereas with inflection you can combine a suffix with some verb to change its form to subject of the sentence. For example: in the present indefinite, we use go with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, whereas for third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns we use goes. So this -es is an inflectional marker and is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source words grammatical category whereas in the process of inflection the word never changes its grammatical category.
Paradigms and morphosyntax

A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns. Accordingly, the word forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person (first, second, third), number (singular vs. plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and case (subjective, objective, and possessive). See English personal pronouns for the details. The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves. An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word formation are not restricted by any corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax, and word formation is not. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word formation or compounding.
Allomorphy

In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning: in each pair, the first word means "one of X", while the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -s affixed to the second word, signaling the key distinction between singular and plural entities. One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, there are word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern, or is not signaled at all. Even cases considered "regular", with the final -s, are not so simple; the -s in

dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, an "extra" vowel appears before the -s. These cases, where the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", are called allomorphy. Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules, by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[ds], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. In order to "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.
Lexical morphology

Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding.

Models
There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture the distinctions above in different ways. These are,

Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement approach. Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process approach. Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-and-Paradigm approach.

Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is very strong, it is not absolute.
Morpheme-based morphology

In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.[5] In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest (and most nave) form, this way of analyzing word forms treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement. More modern and sophisticated approaches seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenative, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for Item-and-Arrangement theories and similar approaches. Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms (cf. Beard 1995 for an overview and references):

Baudoins single morpheme hypothesis: Roots and affixes have the same status as morphemes. Bloomfields sign base morpheme hypothesis: As morphemes, they are dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning. Bloomfields lexical morpheme hypothesis: The morphemes, affixes and roots alike, are stored in the lexicon.

Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one Hockettian. (cf. Bloomfield 1933 and Charles F. Hockett 1947). For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but it was not

meaning itself. For Hockett, morphemes are meaning elements, not form elements. For him, there is a morpheme plural, with the allomorphs -s, -en, -ren etc. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, these two views are mixed in unsystematic ways, so that a writer may talk about "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme -s" in the same sentence, although these are different things.
Lexeme-based morphology

Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.
Word-based morphology

Word-based morphology is (usually) a Word-and-paradigm approach. This theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms, or to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morphemebased theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of a pattern different from the one that has been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation).

Morphological typology
Morphological typology

In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily separable morphemes; while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are "fused" together. This leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. The classic example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages. Considering the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this classification is not at all clear cut, and many languages do not neatly fit any one of these types, and some fit in more than one way. A continuum of complex morphology of language may be adapted when considering languages.

The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or less match different categories in this typology. The Item-and-Arrangement approach fits very naturally with agglutinative languages; while the Item-and-Process and Word-and-Paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages. The reader should also note that the classical typology mostly applies to inflectional morphology. There is very little fusion going on with word formation. Languages may be classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either by using word formation (synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases (analytic). yntax [sntks] n 1. (Linguistics) the branch of linguistics that deals with the grammatical arrangement of words and morphemes in the sentences of a language or of languages in general 2. (Linguistics) the totality of facts about the grammatical arrangement of words in a language 3. (Linguistics) a systematic statement of the rules governing the grammatical arrangement of words and morphemes in a language 4. (Philosophy / Logic) Logic a systematic statement of the rules governing the properly formed formulas of a logical system 5. any orderly arrangement or system [from Late Latin syntaxis, from Greek suntaxis, from suntassein to put in order, from SYN- + tassein to arrange]

Semantics
Semantics (from Greek: smantik, neuter plural of smantiks)[1][2] is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs, and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata. Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used to understand human expression through language. Other forms of semantics include the semantics of programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics. The word semantics itself denotes a range of ideas, from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language to denote a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. This problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal inquiries, over a long period of time, most notably in the field of formal semantics. In linguistics, it is the study of interpretation of signs or symbols as used by agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts.[3] Within this view, sounds, facial expressions, body language, and proxemics have semantic (meaningful) content, and each has several branches of study. In written language, such things as paragraph structure and punctuation have semantic content; in other forms of language, there is other semantic content.[3] The formal study of semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry, including lexicology, syntax, pragmatics, etymology and others, although semantics is a well-defined field in its own right, often with synthetic properties.[4] In philosophy of language, semantics and reference are closely connected. Further related fields include philology, communication, and semiotics. The formal study of semantics is therefore complex. Semantics contrasts with syntax, the study of the combinatorics of units of a language (without reference to their meaning), and pragmatics, the study of the relationships between the symbols of a language, their meaning, and the users of the language.[5] In international scientific vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology.

Contents

1 Linguistics o 1.1 Montague grammar o 1.2 Dynamic turn in semantics o 1.3 Prototype theory o 1.4 Theories in semantics 1.4.1 Model theoretic semantics 1.4.2 Formal (or truth-conditional) semantics 1.4.3 Lexical and conceptual semantics 1.4.4 Lexical semantics 1.4.5 Computational semantics 2 Computer science o 2.1 Programming languages o 2.2 Semantic models 3 Psychology 4 See also o 4.1 Linguistics and semiotics o 4.2 Logic and mathematics o 4.3 Computer science o 4.4 Psychology 5 References 6 External links

Linguistics
In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse (termed texts). The basic area of study is the meaning of signs, and the study of relations between different linguistic units and compounds: homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, paronyms. A key concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text, possibly as a result of the composition from smaller units of meaning. Traditionally, semantics has included the study of sense and denotative reference, truth conditions, argument structure, thematic roles, discourse analysis, and the linkage of all of these to syntax.
Montague grammar

In the late 1960s, Richard Montague proposed a system for defining semantic entries in the lexicon in terms of the lambda calculus. In these terms, the syntactic parse of the sentence John ate every bagel would consist of a subject (John) and a predicate (ate every bagel); Montague showed that the meaning of the sentence as a whole could be decomposed into the meanings of its parts and relatively few rules of combination. The logical predicate thus obtained would be elaborated further, e.g. using truth theory models, which ultimately relate meanings to a set of Tarskiian universals, which may lie outside the logic. The notion of such meaning atoms or primitives is basic to the language of thought hypothesis from the 1970s. Despite its elegance, Montague grammar was limited by the context-dependent variability in word sense, and led to several attempts at incorporating context, such as:

Situation semantics (1980s): truth-values are incomplete, they get assigned based on context Generative lexicon (1990s): categories (types) are incomplete, and get assigned based on context

Dynamic turn in semantics

In Chomskyan linguistics there was no mechanism for the learning of semantic relations, and the nativist view considered all semantic notions as inborn. Thus, even novel concepts were proposed to have been dormant in some sense. This view was also thought unable to address many issues such as metaphor or associative meanings, and semantic change, where meanings within a linguistic community change over time, and qualia or subjective experience. Another issue not addressed by the nativist model was how perceptual cues are combined in thought, e.g. in mental rotation.[6] This view of semantics, as an innate finite meaning inherent in a lexical unit that can be composed to generate meanings for larger chunks of discourse, is now being fiercely debated in the emerging domain of cognitive linguistics[7] and also in the non-Fodorian camp in philosophy of language.[8] The challenge is motivated by:

factors internal to language, such as the problem of resolving indexical or anaphora (e.g. this x, him, last week). In these situations context serves as the input, but the interpreted utterance also modifies the context, so it is also the output. Thus, the interpretation is necessarily dynamic and the meaning of sentences is viewed as context change potentials instead of propositions. factors external to language, i.e. language is not a set of labels stuck on things, but "a toolbox, the importance of whose elements lie in the way they function rather than their attachments to things."[8] This view reflects the position of the later Wittgenstein and his famous game example, and is related to the positions of Quine, Davidson, and others.

A concrete example of the latter phenomenon is semantic underspecification meanings are not complete without some elements of context. To take an example of one word, red, its meaning in a phrase such as red book is similar to many other usages, and can be viewed as compositional.[9] However, the colours implied in phrases such as red wine (very dark), and red hair (coppery), or red soil, or red skin are very different. Indeed, these colours by themselves would not be called red by native speakers. These instances are contrastive, so red wine is so called only in comparison with the other kind of wine (which also is not white for the same reasons). This view goes back to de Saussure:
Each of a set of synonyms like redouter ('to dread'), craindre ('to fear'), avoir peur ('to be afraid') has its particular value only because they stand in contrast with one another. No word has a value that can be identified independently of what else is in its vicinity.[10]

and may go back to earlier Indian views on language, especially the Nyaya view of words as indicators and not carriers of meaning.[11] An attempt to defend a system based on propositional meaning for semantic underspecification can be found in the generative lexicon model of James Pustejovsky, who extends contextual operations (based on type shifting) into the lexicon. Thus meanings are generated on the fly based on finite context.
Prototype theory

Another set of concepts related to fuzziness in semantics is based on prototypes. The work of Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s led to a view that natural categories are not characterizable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but are graded (fuzzy at their boundaries) and inconsistent as to the status of their constituent members.

Systems of categories are not objectively out there in the world but are rooted in people's experience. These categories evolve as learned concepts of the world meaning is not an objective truth, but a subjective construct, learned from experience, and language arises out of the "grounding of our conceptual systems in shared embodiment and bodily experience".[12] A corollary of this is that the conceptual categories (i.e. the lexicon) will not be identical for different cultures, or indeed, for every individual in the same culture. This leads to another debate (see the Sapir Whorf hypothesis or Eskimo words for snow).
Theories in semantics Model theoretic semantics Main article: formal semantics (linguistics)

Originates from Montague's work (see above). A highly formalized theory of natural language semantics in which expressions are assigned denotations (meanings) such as individuals, truth values, or functions from one of these to another. The truth of a sentence, and more interestingly, its logical relation to other sentences, is then evaluated relative to a model.
Formal (or truth-conditional) semantics Main article: truth-conditional semantics

Pioneered by the philosopher Donald Davidson, another formalized theory, which aims to associate each natural language sentence with a meta-language description of the conditions under which it is true, for example: `Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. The challenge is to arrive at the truth conditions for any sentences from fixed meanings assigned to the individual words and fixed rules for how to combine them. In practice, truthconditional semantics is similar to model-theoretic semantics; conceptually, however, they differ in that truthconditional semantics seeks to connect language with statements about the real world (in the form of meta-language statements), rather than with abstract models.
Lexical and conceptual semantics Main article: conceptual semantics

This theory is an effort to explain properties of argument structure. The assumption behind this theory is that syntactic properties of phrases reflect the meanings of the words that head them.[13] With this theory, linguists can better deal with the fact that subtle differences in word meaning correlate with other differences in the syntactic structure that the word appears in.[13] The way this is gone about is by looking at the internal structure of words.[14] These small parts that make up the internal structure of words are termed semantic primitives.[14]
Lexical semantics Main article: lexical semantics

A linguistic theory that investigates word meaning. This theory understands that the meaning of a word is fully reflected by its context. Here, the meaning of a word is constituted by its contextual relations.[15] Therefore, a distinction between degrees of participation as well as modes of participation are made.[15] In order to accomplish this distinction any part of a sentence that bears a meaning and combines with the meanings of other constituents is labeled as a semantic constituent. Semantic constituents that cannot be broken down into more elementary constituents are labeled minimal semantic constituents.[15]
Computational semantics Main article: computational semantics

Computational semantics is focused on the processing of linguistic meaning. In order to do this concrete algorithms and architectures are described. Within this framework the algorithms and architectures are also analyzed in terms of decidability, time/space complexity, data structures they require and communication protocols.[16]

Computer science
Main article: semantics (computer science)

In computer science, the term semantics refers to the meaning of languages, as opposed to their form (syntax). According to Euzenat, semantics "provides the rules for interpreting the syntax which do not provide the meaning directly but constrains the possible interpretations of what is declared."[17] In other words, semantics is about interpretation of an expression. Additionally, the term is applied to certain types of data structures specifically designed and used for representing information content.
Programming languages

The semantics of programming languages and other languages is an important issue and area of study in computer science. Like the syntax of a language, its semantics can be defined exactly. For instance, the following statements use different syntaxes, but cause the same instructions to be executed:
Statement
x += y

Programming languages C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. ALGOL, BCPL, Simula, ALGOL 68, SETL, Pascal, Smalltalk, Modula-2, Ada, Standard ML, OCaml, Eiffel, Object Pascal (Delphi), Oberon, Dylan, VHDL, etc. Assembly languages: Intel 8086 BASIC: early BASIC: most dialects; Fortran, MATLAB Cach ObjectScript COBOL Common Lisp

x := x + y

ADD x, y LET X = X + Y x = x + y Set x = x + y ADD Y TO X GIVING X (incf x y)

Generally these operations would all perform an arithmetical addition of 'y' to 'x' and store the result in a variable called 'x'. Various ways have been developed to describe the semantics of programming languages formally, building on mathematical logic:[18]

Operational semantics: The meaning of a construct is specified by the computation it induces when it is executed on a machine. In particular, it is of interest how the effect of a computation is produced. Denotational semantics: Meanings are modelled by mathematical objects that represent the effect of executing the constructs. Thus only the effect is of interest, not how it is obtained. Axiomatic semantics: Specific properties of the effect of executing the constructs are expressed as assertions. Thus there may be aspects of the executions that are ignored.

Semantic models

Terms such as semantic network and semantic data model are used to describe particular types of data models characterized by the use of directed graphs in which the vertices denote concepts or entities in the world, and the arcs denote relationships between them. The Semantic Web refers to the extension of the World Wide Web via embedding added semantic metadata, using semantic data modelling techniques such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL).

Psychology
In psychology, semantic memory is memory for meaning in other words, the aspect of memory that preserves only the gist, the general significance, of remembered experience while episodic memory is memory for the ephemeral details the individual features, or the unique particulars of experience. Word meaning is measured by the company they keep, i.e. the relationships among words themselves in a semantic network. The memories may be transferred intergenerationally or isolated in one generation due to a cultural disruption. Different generations may have different experiences at similar points in their own time-lines. This may then create a vertically heterogeneous semantic net for certain words in an otherwise homogeneous culture.[19] In a network created by people analyzing their understanding of the word (such as Wordnet) the links and decomposition structures of the network are few in number and kind, and include part of, kind of, and similar links. In automated ontologies the links are computed vectors without explicit meaning. Various automated technologies are being developed to compute the meaning of words: latent semantic indexing and support vector machines as well as natural language processing, neural networks and predicate calculus techniques. Ideasthesia is a rare psychological phenomenon that in certain individuals associates semantic and sensory representations. Activation of a concept (e.g., that of the letter A) evokes sensory-like experiences (e.g., of red color